Age of Adepts

Chapter 186 Reinforcements Arrive

The adepts’ base became even busier after the victory.

The winged dragon knights beat their wide fleshy wings, rising and landing all about the camp, sending the witcher-knights to and fro. These exceptional spoils of war were sent into Adept Keoghan’s lab the moment they reached the base, and what was waiting for them was a terrifying nightmare they had never experienced in their lives.

Greem saw the native teenager amidst the people bustling about with work. He was now an important assistant for Adept Keoghan, helping him do some auxiliary tasks in the modification and construction of voodoo beasts.

Keoghan passed the work of checking the inventory for fresh ‘materials’ to the teenager, and walked over when he saw Greem return.

”You did well this time! Lord Sarubo mentioned your name just now. It seems the Lord has been paying attention to you!” Keoghan couldn’t help but pat Greem on the shoulder and praise him.

It was obvious that Adept Keoghan felt respect and admiration for Lord Sarubo from the bottom of his heart.

But once he thought of the fact that nothing in the adepts’ base could escape the vast yet fine mental senses of Lord Sarubo, Greem felt a shiver go down his spine. But he could only respond kindly to Keoghan’s act of intimacy. He even chose to ignore the bloody handprint left on his shoulder.

”Why’s that little fellow still alive?” Greem asked curiously.

When he passed the teenager to Keoghan, Greem had thought he would come back to find his body attached to another voodoo beast!

”Our plan here is to rule this plane, so local puppets are a must. He has an exceptional talent. As long as we perform some slight modifications, he could easily become one of the best spellcasters from this plane. When the time comes, it’s easier if he represents us instead of having us do everything.” A wicked grin appeared on Keoghan’s cold face.

”How are the resources in this plane? How large of a benefit can we get?”

”From the current analysis, the assets with the most strategic value are the white-starred alocasias, the fire-dragon herbs, the royal-blood herbs, the seasoul stars, the spacestones and the breeding flowers.”

”There are spacestones and breeding flowers in this plane?” An expression of disbelief appeared on Greem’s face.

All material planes developed from tiny little pseudo-planes, and the time taken for such development often required several hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, in the course of its long development, the inside of a plane had a high possibility of containing spacestones that drifted from the depths of the galaxy.

This spacestone was one of the main materials used in constructing long-range teleportation arrays.

Even in the resource-rich World of Adepts, these were a strategic resource strictly controlled by high grade adepts. A normal adept clan would not have access to it.

The breeding flower, on the other hand, was also an interesting thing.

It’s a rare plant, but also a unique herb.

Using the breeding flower as the main ingredient, the alchemist adepts can brew a mysterious potion that allowed powerful adepts to give birth. It’s important to note that in the development history of the adepts, it was extremely difficult for adepts above the Second Grade to have an offspring.

On one hand you have a high grade adept, and on the other you have a normal human. The chance of having a normal offspring was astronomical. If both parties were high grade adepts, the chances become even lower.

After all, adepts were a group of individuals that constantly changed, modified and mutated their body in the process of advancing, almost as much as magical creatures. Moreover, a great deal of the mutations were natural, random mutations. Don’t look at how most high grade adepts still retained a human appearance. If you were to take a detailed look at their bodily essence and source, you would realise they were quite different from humans.

Some high grade adepts’ mutations were even more thorough, to even have mutated their soul’s essence into something completely unrecognizable. If a high grade adept got together with a similar partner, their chance of giving birth to a normal human baby was almost zero.

Frankly speaking, their chance of giving birth to a magical creature was higher than giving birth to a human child!

Thus, why was it that the adept clans placed so much importance on the continuation and legacy of family bloodlines, such that they encouraged the low grade adepts to quickly leave behind some bloodlines and offspring for the clan? This was the main reason!

If a talented adept appeared among the descendants of a large clan, he wouldn’t even need to expend the effort to find beauties. His family would automatically find all sorts of attractive women, even all sorts of races for him to pick from.

This was both a boon for the adept as well as a means for the clan to continue their bloodline!

Therefore, any means or medicine that could aid the chances of conceiving became a rare resource that was in great demand by high grade adepts. The breeding flower was one such amazing plant, that allowed the superior genes of both the father and mother to perfectly merge and give rise to a baby with amazing and powerful talent.

As for whether the baby was still a human, no one really cared!

The discovery of breeding flowers in this insignificant knights’ plane was undoubtedly going to bring about immense benefit for the Sarubo clan. And as the clan grew, they, as the batch of adepts who led the excavation of the new plane, would also be greatly rewarded.

The veteran adepts might not care about such rewards, but for newly advanced adepts such as Greem, who had no wealth at all, this meant that he would not need to run about outside to gather resources for a hundred years.

In a situation where he was not pressured to find resources to advance, Greem had at least two hundred years of leisure time to slowly accumulate knowledge and research the direction of his future development.

After exchanging a few more words with Keoghan, Greem returned to the row of stone houses, decided on a random house, shut the door, and went to rest. At the battle in the valley this time, he had participated fully and functioned as the core of the strategy- all the way from the start of the baiting, to the counterattack, to the final battle.

And accordingly, his Spirit was drained and badly ‘bruised’. These losses would not recover by themselves. He could only rely on a long rest to fix them!

At least there would not be any threats around the adepts’ base after exterminating those witcher-knights. There would be a period of peace! As for when the next batch of enemies would arrive; that was out of Greem’s control.

Understanding this, Greem let go of all his concerns, summoned the Lightning Giant to protect him, and fell into a deep sleep on the stone bed.

While he was sleeping, Mary had returned to the base, bringing with her two withered spellbreaker knight corpses. Even though such spoils of war didn’t have much value to them, Keoghan still gladly received them.

After all, as compared to Acteon, Mary had brought something back. Acteon hadn’t even left a withered corpse behind. However, he did have a group of odd black beetles the size of a washing basin. There were about twenty-one or twenty-two of them. It looked like they were his newest gains.

Adept Keoghan was a veteran adept that had advanced for three centuries after all. He was able to swiftly determine that these were a group of carcass beetles, based solely on their unique appearance. Even though these were only young beetles, they still had terrifying power.

Carcass beetles could be considered a kind of horrifying magical creature that lived in groups.

They had tough shells that didn’t lose to Body Refining Adepts. They could fly, tunnel, and use their sharp teeth or claws to attack their enemies. Adult carcass beetles even boasted superior magic resistance, such that even spell attacks below 100 points of damage couldn’t scratch their bodies.

With all of these advantages together, a swarm of carcass beetles were not an enemy an adept wanted to make.

The scorpions he used to feed with flesh and Spirit previously were too inferior, and couldn’t be used in important battles, or fights between adepts. But now that the carcass beetles had appeared, it meant that Acteon had managed to raise his evil bug swarm to a level that matched him as an adept.

When all these carcass beetles matured, then Acteon would become a terrifying individual- even amongst the First Grade Adepts!

Mary gritted her teeth and left after walking to and fro where Greem was resting for a bit.

An entire army of witcher-knights had died in the woods. If she didn’t seal the news quickly, the entire Duran province might be alerted. Therefore, Mary hurried back to Blue Hillock City in order to use her influence there to nip all kinds of troublesome news in the bud before they could spread.

Acteon, who had a similar burden, didn’t stay in the base for long, and quickly left for the woods. He needed to set up bug traps on all the key entrances to the mountain to avoid any news from getting outside.

There were two mountain villages and a small town on the edge of Greenland Forest. He had only taken down Colca Village. If the hunters or adventurers from the other village or town broke into the battlefield and found something, their efforts to conceal the truth would have been for nothing.

Coincidentally, the batch of carcass beetles he had just bred needed a large amount of blood to grow. This time, Acteon had already planned on conquering the remaining village and town. He could snuff out all sources of information getting out while also increasing his own strength; why wouldn’t he do it?!

…………

It took four days before Greem finally woke up from his deep slumber!

He didn’t want to wake up so early, but the odd energy flux by his side made it hard for him to sleep, so he had to wake up ahead of time.

He had just opened his eyes when he felt a strong and intense flux in space.

This space flux was so familiar, and so hard to forget, that Greem could determine what it was immediately.

Interplanar ultra long ranged teleportation!

The last time their group had been brought over from the Sarubo clan’s pseudo-plane platform was through such a ultra long ranged interplanar teleportation. The teleportation that time was a painful and torturous experience for Greem, so he remembered it very clearly!

But even though he understood the nature of the space flux, more questions surfaced in Greem’s mind.

According to Adept Keoghan, the second batch of adepts should be arriving one month from now! But now… Greem checked the notification on his chip- they had only been on this knights’ plane for no more than 18 days, 11 hours, 33 minutes, and 31 seconds.

The question had just surfaced in Greem’s mind when he revealed a cold grin.

As expected of a Sixth Grade Adept that could manipulate and toy with others!

He had said it would be one month, but in truth he only needed 18 days to send the reinforcements over. Thus, even if there were traitors among them, or if any of them had been captured by the natives of this plane, the information they would reveal would be inaccurate and hardly cause any impact on the following actions.

That projection of Lord Sarubo probably tricked even Keoghan!