Chapter 207: The Deadline of Two Months
Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Pranav
The weather in the Earth Elemental Plane was quite unpleasant. At least one-third of each day would be spent amid sandstorms where nothing could be seen. The rather terrifying sounds of the sandstorms could be heard even in our underground caves.
Of course, we had the ability to go out even in such weather, but many things would be impossible to accomplish outside; it was more effective to remain at camp and save our energy. There were many things to be done at camp as well.
Some of us were adapting to the environment, some were polishing their swords, some simply slept, and someone had long since lost their patience.
“Ahhh! This is so frustrating; when will this annoying sandstorm finally stop? The heavy smell of earth in this plane makes me want to vomit; let’s hurry up and kill off Emordilorcan and go home already. Camdian, are you still not finished with your preparations? Are you still as weak and cowardly as always?”
“I call it caution, my respectable Lady Aylos. Before we get used to the nature of this Earth Elemental Plane, our combat ability will be halved—especially for you whose powers are countered by earth. You’ll probably be at even less than half. Meanwhile, Emordilorcan will have an endless amount of power to replenish himself, so we must first get accustomed to the nature of this plane.”
“Hmph, how boring. I’m going to sleep; call me when the time is set.”
“Alright, Lady Aylos. I wish you sweet dreams!”
We were all rather surprised at how the two Elemental Gods talked to each other. Their personalities were completely opposite from what we had expected.
Aylos’ icy and exquisite appearance had, in a way, fooled us. After being together for a short while, her icy-beauty impression had vanished; underneath her beauty that seemed like water was an impatient personality as wild as fire.
Not only was the Water Elemental Goddess like this, but based on my experience so far, all of the other Elemental Gods were similar in being the complete opposites of their elements’ natures.
“According to common logic, fire mages will become easily angered and impatient, thunder and wind mages will become casual and free-spirited, water and ice mages will become easygoing and calm, while earth mages will become docile and honest. This should be the influence of the elements’ own natures.”
Yet by just looking at the Elemental Gods before us, it could be seen that that could be no further from the truth.
“This is totally different from what everyone expected. The Wind Elemental God who should have been extremely free-spirited is actually the super-cautious type, the Water Elemental Goddess that should have been gentle and easygoing is actually a hot-tempered lady, and Emordilorcan who should have been docile and honest as the Earth Elemental God is actually a vicious, sly fox. Then what will the personality of the Fire Elemental Goddess who should have been fiery and domineering be? I bet she’s a little girl who loves peace and flowers.”
Fine then. A future coincidental meeting will help me discover that my worldview-shattering guess had actually been correct. Meanwhile, since we had time for idle chatter, when we asked what we were all thinking, Camdian helped explain things to us.
“The natures of our elements? Yes, it’s true to begin with, and I wasn’t such a cautious individual in the past. But after being cheated or on the worse end of things for enough times, I became the cautious type. As for Lady Aylos, all water elementals have mega-slow personalities, so communicating with them could probably make anyone impatient. Staying in such an environment would probably change anyone into a slow personality themselves or change them into a mega-impatient type like her. Emordilorcan’s probably the same case. If it wasn’t for how vicious and sly he could be, how could he possibly defeat the other veteran earth elementals and become the Earth Elemental God, living until today?”
It seemed that stories weren’t always true. Even with innate natures, they couldn’t compare to personalities shaped by later influences in life. This gossip was quite interesting to hear, but right now, I didn’t have the time to consider other things. My own troubles were quite bothersome as well.
“Silver Dignity; Golden Will?”
As I listened to the sandstorm outside, I sunk into deep contemplation. This time, the Slaying a God quest had given me abundant rewards. Apart from that God Equipment Felix’s Hatred and various materials, my wallet was now filled with approximately 70,000 Fate Points.
These points were definitely sufficient to exchange for some necessary skills and improve my overall rank to Gold, but I was hesitating.
Every rank had its foundational differences. Taking the next step without sufficient understanding would mean missing out on the path’s necessary experience. Obtaining this experience later down the road would be impossible; it might even become a bottleneck for future progression.
The Gold rank was special among all the ranks; just casually entering Gold would definitely not be a wise idea.
My system had planned my path for me before the Gold rank, with levels 1 through 60. All the basic common job classes were present here, and there wasn’t much difference between them. Most job classes’ commonly-used combat techniques and skills would be mastered while still at the Silver rank, and the main goal was to perfect one’s mastery before changing fundamentally, finally transforming common and foundational abilities into personalized styles.
“I have to make a choice? It seems just sitting here in contemplation won’t be enough.”
Any system of knowledge’s steps for improvement would consist of going from only one skill to becoming a generalist, before going back from a generalist to a specialist. Cultivation was naturally the same.
The Iron and Bronze ranks were for training the physical body and activating one’s potential and talents, and at the Silver rank, combat techniques and so on would be familiarized. After that, the physical body would no longer be able to be improved, and it was time to develop one’s mental potential and combine everything they have learned, creating an internal world of their own.
The next step would be for the person’s individual internal world to be able to affect the outside world. That was the so-called “Golden Will,” and also the point where a choice would have to be made.
When a normal job class was cultivated to the limit, it would be time to choose a promoted class. And these promoted job classes, such as “Beast King Hunter,” “Shadow Dancer” and so on were merely paths that strong people from the past had developed on their own.
Following another’s path would perhaps be a quick and easy progress, but there were no identical people in this world. Even twins with identical genes would have numerous differences between them, and someone else’s path was always someone else’s to begin with—it couldn’t possibly be one hundred percent appropriate for you. Walking down that path to a certain extent would always give rise to insurmountable obstacles.
Of course, there were always exceptions, such as Reyne. From a certain standpoint, she was basically a female clone of Karwenz, and all she needed to do was walk down the same path as him. With the exact same Soul Imprint supporting her, she would certainly reach an incredibly high level.
As an aside, although the surgery to switch out Glina’s blood was an incredible success, it wouldn’t be possible to do the same with Reyne. She had become Karwenz’s host once already and possessed a far stronger connection with the Chaos Abyss. Forcefully switching out her blood would be no different from switching her soul, not to mention that this would be interfering with one of Karwenz’s critical personal benefits and he would almost certainly emerge and give me trouble, which was something I did not desire.
And, so, the method I used for Reyne was to slowly inject my fresh blood and use magic medicine to suppress Karwenz’s bloodline so that it wouldn’t be too active. This was obviously no long-term solution, but I could only hope that Reyne could find a way to break free on her own to separate herself from Karwenz. Only by cutting off the connection would she be able to free herself from the beckoning of the Chaos Abyss.
“Don’t desire power from others; improve your own techniques and willpower through continuous battle to create your own combat style. By the time I return, I hope to see a brand-new you.”
Saying this, I kicked Reyne away. Perhaps the Earth Elemental Plane wasn’t suitable for living in, but it was definitely a great place for cultivation—in such a hostile environment, merely surviving would help one become stronger.
Moreover, I haven’t been giving Reyne any of my blood recently. I was hoping that she could use her own willpower to resist the Chaos Abyss. This wasn’t any type of strange strategy where “a lion would push its baby lion down a cliff to strengthen the baby’s body” or anything like that; I’ve always felt that some animals’ ways of raising their babies were incomprehensible.
Did the ability to climb a cliff have anything to do with survival? Babies should be growing under their parents’ care, learning techniques to hunt and growing stronger in body and mind. Kicking them off a cliff when they weren’t even mature yet would cause either the baby lion to fall to death or starve to death.
Cough, I seem to have gotten sidetracked again; where was I? Oh right, why I wasn’t injecting my blood… actually, the reason was quite simple. I didn’t want to die, and I wanted even less to die due to the strange reason of anemia.
Back when I helped Glina exchange her blood, I used up almost one-third of the blood in my body. This was already near the fatal limit for a normal person. I hadn’t even regained my lost blood yet when I already helped Reyne inject blood twice, so I’ve become incredibly anemic recently.
Not even mentioning the headaches and dizziness, but whenever I woke up every morning, my blurry vision caused by anemia was basically impossible to deal with. I’d already mistaken Reyne and Elisa for each other twice already and went into a few wrong places, causing some rather laughable incidents.
“Your vision is blurry? That’s why you were naked in the morning and running around out in public for all to see? To use such an excuse, you must think we’re all little children.”
“Let me explain! At the time, I was just dazedly following a procession to go to the showering halls, and when I heard them saying they were going to take off their clothes, I thought that we reached the showers already, but who knew—who knew…”
“Who knew that you actually followed Eaglestorm and Xueti’s procession and you guys all started taking off your clothes right in public?”
“…When I discovered what was going on, it was already too late! I’m not someone who can’t be saved!”
“Yep, you saved yourself; you stole a bystander’s clothes and then walked back home all proudly. However…” When she got to this point, Elisa glared at me coldly and adjusted her eyeglasses. The icy condescension in her eyes was humiliating.
“…You ended up robbing a lady’s clothes instead. Not only did you wear some lacy female clothing home, but you even had a lady stay by herself in an alley, naked, for half an hour. Do you know how much effort we spent on convincing the witnesses that they saw Princess Reyne who was intending to change her style rather than an insane His Highness Roland? For the newly-created Observers Squad to go all out for such a first mission is nothing more than utter humiliation.”
I couldn’t reply to Elisa at the time. Back then, I was so dizzy and couldn’t see anything so I could only dart into an alley. It was so difficult to catch anyone at all, so how could I care about anything else?
“But that doesn’t seem right. Although I couldn’t see the person’s face at the time, I remembered that person had a muscular body. Wasn’t she actually a man—a muscular man? That person also happily gave me their clothing.”
“She’s one of Omar’s good friends, one of the core members of the ‘Muscle-Loving Club.’ To be honest, she kept viewing this incident with pride, and if it weren’t for us stopping her she would probably go around bragging to everyone about her female charisma. If that happened, your reputation isn’t important, but if you got us dragged into it…”
Alright, seeing everyone approach me with evil intentions, all I could do was clutch my head, crouch, and then shout out loudly.
“Don’t hit my face!”
Recalling back to the beating I received from everyone that morning, my cheek started twinging. Elisa really didn’t hold back at all on me even though I clearly told her to not hit my face.
There was no helping it. Thanks to my prior experiences, injecting any more of my blood into Reyne would be impossible until I at least recovered completely. I could only count on her own willpower.
After saying goodbye to Reyne, it was also time for me to get going. This wasn’t only a place for their cultivation, but it was also the place I chose for my personal cultivation as well.
“Rather than staying inside and considering my future combat style and development path, let’s just use actual combat to test things out instead.”
In order to reach the peak, I had never considered the already created high-ranked job classes. My path to Gold had to belong to me alone, and since the mortal plane’s situation was now somewhat steadied, I finally had some time to consider my personal future.
If it were someone else, using such a short period of time to complete the foundational change from Silver to Gold would be impossible, but I had countless amounts of combat experience and knowledge to back me up. And this wasn’t even mentioning my system’s Fate Points, which would help increase the speed and effectiveness of my cultivation. These two months of actual combat training would be enough for me to finish walking down this path.
“Alright, everyone, see you all in two weeks.”
And so, this temporary team split up for the time being as everyone prepared in their own way for combat as according to our plans.
Emordilorcan would definitely be difficult to deal with. The Earth Elemental God was now in his home plane, and he could use the Earth Elemental Plane’s power as he pleased to strengthen himself, making himself nigh undefeatable. If it weren’t for the fact that Emordilorcan was obviously heavily injured and that he was in a state of hibernation to help himself recover, there was no way I would follow him all the way here.
Even so, dealing with the heavily injured Emordilorcan was no easy matter. As visitors from another plane, we needed time to get used to the natural laws of this world. This was especially more so for the Wind and Water Elemental Gods Camdian and Aylos. Before they could finally get used to the Earth Elemental Plane, they’d likely be able to use less than half of their actual power.
The others were the same as well. How well a mage performed on the battlefield depended on how much preparation was done beforehand. Amelia and Margaret both wanted time to prepare for combat and the scene of combat beforehand, placing traps and creating cannon fodder. Their two months would be very busy.
And it was the same for me, Adam, and Reyne. While we would make the most of these two months to increase our overall capabilities, we also needed to get used to fighting in the Earth Elemental Plane. The two months would likely pass by in a flash for us.
There was one more person? Cough, let’s just forget about him, okay? What? I absolutely have to talk about him? Fine then, don’t regret it… That fellow’s gentlemanly, undying body was perhaps already cultivated to the highest level. Even after receiving such a heavenly tribulation, he recovered quickly and left our camp without returning.
Margaret had indeed stayed in contact with him and was aware of what Beifeng was up to. Yet judging by the look of disgust on Margaret’s face—when she was always the expressionless type to begin with—I decided not to ask what happened.
“Beifeng said he can convince a group of fighters to come over and help us. I believe he can most likely accomplish it.”
Okay, although this was a piece of good news, I couldn’t be happy about it at all since I really didn’t want to know how he was going to do it! Nor did I want to guess. At this moment, for the first time, I started regretting having Beifeng come here and assist us.
Soon enough, with help from Margaret’s random teleportation, I put on a tan woolen cape and thick dwarven anti-wind goggles as I began my own journey of cultivation.
“Oh my, what a passionate host you are.”
Before I even steadied myself after the random teleportation spell, the entire ground began shaking. A piece of land suddenly sunk into the ground, and a scorpion-shaped monster crawled out—it was only slightly smaller than a dragon in size.
The scorpion’s plating seemed to be as hard as iron, and its barbed tail seemed to be gathering energy, while the hundreds of eyeballs on its tiny head were all staring at me with an obvious murderous intent.
“You discovered me from my footsteps? Oh man—oh man, it seems the next two months will be quite difficult.”
Even though I said so, I laughed out loud in joy.
“I haven’t enjoyed the simple feeling of battle in so long. Little scorpion, let me have some fun with you.”