The Ultimate Evolution

“I have a way to track them, but I have to pay a huge price — I’ll have to use an expensive casting material. I can’t bear the cost alone,” Dardanian suddenly said.

Hedi Curry immediately replied with impatience, “Fine, we’ll each contribute 10,000 utility points. Is that enough?”

Dardanian nodded in response. In order to prove that he was telling the truth, he took out the casting material in question — a vial of green dragon’s blood!

The dragon’s blood was indeed as expensive as he claimed. It shined in the glass test tube, reflecting the light off the setting suns like green emerald. Anyone who laid eyes upon it would find their sight constantly refracting and traveling through the blood, unable to be pulled back.

With the dragon’s blood in his hand, Dardanian chanted a mysterious spell. The mana around his body surged bizarrely, as if it was boiling. The dragon’s blood slowly floated into the air. The spell wrapped around the dragon’s blood like it had a physical form. Finally, the dragon’s blood turned into a dark green blood sphere the size of a ping pong ball, suspended in the air in front of Dardanian. Its surface shined with a mysterious glow, as if it was an emerald housing a powerful soul inside.

Dardanian went to a patch of purple reeds next to the camp and started to chant in a mysterious and powerful language. While he was chanting, Ramtas suddenly conveyed a thought to Sheyan.

“Master, this is the rank 7 nature spell ‘The Language of Nature’.”

“No way!!” Sheyan almost could not believe it.

In many highly magical worlds, Druids and Elves often claimed to be able to communicate with plants. The ability sounded a bit mysterious, but the theory behind it was actually really simple. An experienced old farmer would only need one look at a paddy field from afar to know whether the rice had grown sick; that was also a way of communicating with plants. The so-called plant communication ability of the Druids and Elves was a more advanced form of that, made possible by their natural talent. They could learn the joys, sorrows and emotions of plants from a touch of their leaves, a subtle change in their scent and so on.

This was not the case with the Rank 7 nature spell, ‘The Language of Nature’. The spell relied entirely on a dragon’s authority carried in the dragon’s blood to simulate the power of storms and rains to subdue plants and make them submit. The subdued plants would then carry out the caster’s will, even if they had to hurt themselves doing so!

The main reason it was considered a powerful Rank 7 magic spell was because this ability could also be used on Ents. A normal Ent would either directly surrender, or be severely restrained and damaged.

To use the spell for their current purpose was like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut; it was complete overkill. In truth, Dardanian had lost his reason, overcome by his greed of Pi veins.

After Dardanian finished his chant, he shouted to the purple reeds around him.

“Where did those people go? Tell me! In the name of Nature!”

The blood of the green dragon floating in front of Dardanian abruptly extended out, as if an invisible goose-feather quill had dipped into the green dragon’s blood and rapidly wrote in the air. Strange and dignified texts were formed. The texts were in the ancient Hebrew language, the holy language! These were holy words!

Everyone present could feel a mysterious force in the words written by Dardanian, which seemed to resonate with the whole of nature!

In that instant, the purple reeds hundreds of meters around them slowly bowed down, but they all bowed in different directions. Then, as the people watched on in amazement, they found themselves in the middle of a huge arrow that was hundreds of square meters in size! The arrow was pointing to the northwest.

Of course everyone understood what this meant. They jumped back onto the raft and paddled to the northwest. By now, everyone had become really excited by the prospect of finding high purity Pi ores; even Paul could not help taking up an oar and helping in the rowing. Therefore, the raft moved swiftly in the swamp.

Every few hundred meters, Dardanian would use holy texts to communicate with nature and correct their direction. After traveling for more than 5 miles, they were still in the seemingly endless swamp, but Ramtas suddenly grunted. It twitched its nose carefully several times, then turned to Sheyan and told him, “I smell blood, master.”

Sheyan instantly stopped the raft and asked, “Which direction?”

Ramtas’ fat nose twitched again a few times. It proceeded to jump off the raft and ran ahead, ignoring the mud gripping at his feet. When they turned a corner and sailed approximately a kilometer further following behind Ramtas, they arrived at a depression in the marshy landscape that was filled with a type of water lily-like plant.

In the middle of the fishscale bamboo grove on the western bank of the depression lay a man facing down. His clothes were very tattered but they could be vaguely recognised as a military uniform. The man was motionless, as if he had fallen asleep.

The Perceptive Senses of the people on the raft were ten times more sensitive than that of the ordinary people, so even from such a distance, they could already sense that the man had stopped breathing and his heart had stopped beating. In other words, he was dead.

“Nobody move!” Curry raised his hand and ordered. “Don’t contaminate the crime scene. Ronnie, go check it out.”

Ronnie’s figure flashed like a phantom and vanished from where he was, only to reappear at the scene. After a quick investigation, he already had a result.

“This man is called Daniel. He’s been dead for three hours. Cause of death: poisoning, which is why his body’s still preserved in one piece. Otherwise, he would’ve been eaten by the creatures around here.”

Upon hearing Ronnie’s words, Sheyan found that if he looked carefully, he could see a large number of snake corpses and bug corpses around the human body. It was just that the vegetation here was dense, so they were not immediately visible at first sight.

Ronnie continued, “This man was probably not a soldier. First, there’s no military dog tag on his body. Second, the abnormal development of muscles on his body should be the result of very cruel combat training. Third, his body should’ve been modified to some extent so that he can freely breathe the air here without any side effects.”

After Ronnie performed some poison prevention measures and looked carefully for a while, he searched through the man’s body and found a hand-drawn map. Looking at the size of the map, it should be depicting the terrain hundreds of square kilometers nearby.

The map was drawn on animal skin with charred branches. Although the map was crude, it was drawn by a professional, so it strived to convey the most information possible with the least amount of strokes.

They saw from the map that the size of the swamp was quite astonishing. The edge of the swamp was not even visible on the map. The temporary campsite they had set out from was marked with a circle, and there was another circle drawn about a dozen kilometers above it. The words “food/bird” were written beside the latter circle. The survivors seemed to have gone hunting for this type of creature.

A red cross was struck at the canyon where Sheyan and the others had come from. The survivors seemed to know that the place contained a huge threat. Besides that, a red skull was marked in the north, indicating extreme danger there!

Now that a corpse has been found, they had no use for the raft anymore because Daniel appeared to have ran away immediately after being attacked, but after he escaped here, he still died from poisoning. So Ronnie, who was skilled in tracking, could just trace back along Daniel’s fleeing route to find the place where the survivors were attacked.

At that moment, Curry suddenly turned towards Sheyan and asked without any shame, “Hey, Seaman, we’ll probably confront some poisonous creatures soon. Do you have any medicine to resist poison?”

Although Sheyan did not have any, he simply replied, “I do, but it can’t coexist with the buffing mix. Are you sure you want the poison-resistant mix?”

Hedi Curry instantly hesitated. Although these people had not said anything to Sheyan about his gene-mix, they were actually in awe of the buffing effect the mixes provided. Otherwise, they would never have tolerated the actions of Sheyan’s group again and again.

This was especially so because their equipments were generally one tier lower than Party Ace’s. Even if Sheyan used the inferior cloud bluffing method, they would still get +8% or +6 in all attributes. The value of that needed no explanation. It could possibly enable them to deal crushing damages to the opponent, or suppress the opponent.

Some of them could also make use of the buffs provided by Sheyan’s mix to wear certain equipments that they could not wear before. It was just that when the effect of the mix disappeared and the equipping conditions were no longer met, the equipments would turn red, losing all their effects.

Hearing Sheyan’s reply, Hedi Curry could only sigh and said with a dismissive wave, “Never mind, then. I’ll take the buff mix.”

At this point, Ronnie suddenly pointed out sharply, “I heard that you can produce a mix for individual consumption that can provide a buff of either 10% or 8 points in all attributes. Why haven’t you given it to us?”

Sheyan had long thought of an excuse for that. He shrugged and answered in a mocking tone, “Mr. Ronnie, let me ask you this. What’s the value of an equipment that increases all attributes by either 10% or 8 points?”