Supreme Magus

Chapter 4320: No Maybe (Part 2)

”I said we don’t talk about that.” Lith snarled. ”Get off my back. Go do something useful that doesn’t involve mocking me.”

”Damn, that killed all my list of daily activities.” Protector chuckled. ”See you later, then.”

The Tower Warp had already brought them back to the Mansion, and Lith let his friends off before taking a short trip to the Blood Desert to drop his prisoners.

”I’m going to practice control over the scattered Cursed Elements. Do you want to join me? I could use an extra set of eyes.” Lith asked once they returned to Lutia for good.

”I wish. Now that the Fusion Reactor is at full capacity, I have to start hunting for Adamant scraps with the Watchtower.” Solus groaned. ”I’ll travel back to all the mana geysers we know and mine everything I can.

”The more Adamant we have, the faster the Crucible works. Even if we stumble into a Divine Beast’s corpse or we kill one, it would be useless until we have enough metal to coat its skin and bones.

”You stay here and keep researching Dread Magic without me. Anyone can use the Eyes to study your progress, and there’s no point in wasting your time keeping me company. I’m not looking for a fight, and I don’t expect trouble.

”Even if something unexpected happens, I have the tower, the Engine, and you can instantly reach me as long as you stand on the Mansion’s mana geyser.”

”Have fun, then.” Lith shrugged.

”I wish. The next few days are going to be the longest of my life.” She sighed.

Solus thought about taking Valeron with her, but decided otherwise.

’Val has no affinity for the Cursed Elements, just like me, but he’d miss his siblings.’ She thought. ’I can’t even ask Tista to accompany me for a bit of sparring. I’m a terrible fighter in my Divine Beast form, but fighting inside would damage the tower.

’Fighting outside, instead, would throw discretion to the wind. We cause small quakes whenever we fight. Even a blind man would hear us from kilometers away. Mom is bound to Lith, so I’ll have to settle for a good book as a travel companion.’

Solus sat on the command throne of the Watchtower and set the coordinates for the Snake Mountain Range, in the ancient Odi ruins where Dawn had built her secret lab after escaping from the Rezars’ Fringe.

’The place is uninhabited and in the middle of nowhere.’ She thought. ’According to Nalrond and the Royal Prospectors, it will be centuries before the mana crystal veins are viable, but maybe they have missed a very deep metal vein.’

Starforge used the Mana Injector to produce pulses of world energy that the Ears used to locate the presence of magical resources, akin to a radar. Magical metals and crystals absorbed part of the world energy, and the rest would bounce back to the tower.

The greater the depth, the longer a single scan took, and Solus took several scans before assessing whether the current site was a hit or miss.

’This is a miss.’ She sighed. ’I found lots of crystals, but we’ve got plenty of those. I’ll mark their position for future reference.’

The following Tower Warp brought her near the Broken Spine Mountain, another site where she and Lith had spent a lot of time during his tour as a Ranger.

’It’s a hit!’ She clenched her first. ’A small hit, though. There isn’t much Adamant and it’s located very deep underground. The rest is silver and Orichalcum.’

Solus confirmed the position and quantity of the magic metal, providing the tower with the instructions it needed to automate the process. It was then that the boredom began.

Thanks to the Ears, the Eyes, and the tower core missing only a few layers of enchantments, identifying and locating the different kinds of enchanted metals took her just a few minutes.

Extracting them, however, was a different story entirely. If the magical metals were deep in the ground, the mining operations would take hours. If they were deep and scattered all across the mana geyser’s surroundings, it would take much longer.

The tendrils produced by the tower had to move through the ground slowly, to avoid causing cave-ins that might bury the metal deeper or reveal Solus’ presence.

The process left no trace of the Watchtower’s interference since the ground turned soft when a tendril passed and hardened once it was gone.

Also, the mining operations rarely required Solus’ attention, but she couldn’t get away from the tower in case an emergency arose. She had to endure long, tedious hours every time the Watchtower found something, giving her successful hunts the taste of failure.

”Gods, this is so boring!” She talked to herself to fight the loneliness. ”I’ll revise the Void Magic textbook one more time. Let’s see if there’s something we could have done better.”

The idea was good, but the execution was quick. Solus had written the textbook herself and examined its contents many times. She knew it like the back of her hand and finished what would have taken a student hours of diligent reading in minutes.

By the time the Watchtower had completed mining the Adamant from the first scrap mine, Solus had already revised two-thirds of the textbook. She completed her task while the tower was still in the middle of extracting the magic metal from the next scrap mine she had found.

”Okay, now what?” She sighed. ”It’s too early for lunch, and the more metal I leave behind, the longer I will have to stay once I return here from home. Let’s try something new.”

With no one to talk to and nothing to do, Solus decided to experiment with the Watchtower. The automated collection system had already memorized the position of the Adamant, so the Watchtower just scouted the tower’s surroundings for potential threats.

Solus sat on the command throne and recalled the energy of the Menadion Set and the Watchtower, focusing them into a narrow beam of highly compressed world energy. She named it the Beacon, and it allowed her to investigate areas hundreds of kilometers away from the tower as if she were there.

The Beacon’s range matched the Eyes of Menadion’s while fueled by the tower, showing everything in a straight line from Solus. Once she noticed something interesting, the Beacon released pulses of world energy that the Ears of Menadion used to investigate the local mana currents.

”This is so exciting!” Solus said as she discovered new and old dwellings on both the surface and under the ground. ”Who knows, maybe I can find a lost treasure. Scratch that, I have no need for antiques.

”An ancient, hidden deposit of Adamant would be so much better. Magical metals don’t rust, and whatever protection is left to guard them should be either on the verge of crumbling or so outdated that we could crack it in our sleep.

”Come on, Watchtower, don’t let me down. Mommy needs a new armor.”

Unfortunately for her, magical treasures didn’t pile up out of the goodness of their nonexistent hearts, and whoever took the trouble to do that didn’t leave the fruits of their hard work up for grabs.