Andrew Robinson Leinbach
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Chapter 189: Steel Swamp Sorin
🕑 Added 2023-07-04 23:51:07 +0000 UTCMila
“Is that it?” Isaiah asked as he put down his 212th bag of spatial storage artifacts inside Mila’s quarters in the Violet Mountain Blessed Land.
“Yeah.” It had been over an hour since Mila’d found anything worth stealing while using her sensory domain to look through the planet’s cities, so it seemed after nearly twenty days she and Isaiah were finally done with their looting work. “And Aalam’s got that AI practically drooling to have him as the blessed land’s heir, so we should hopefully have the possibility of leaving in a couple of hours.”
With that, Mila traveled via the planet’s undamaged teleportation platforms to the city nearest the still pretty much entirely destroyed central hub and then ran at full speed toward the portal leading to the blessed land. And, while she did so, she sent a message to Nana Xara.
“You haven’t said anything throughout this entire process. That is so unlike you.”
“I figured you might not want my perspective at the moment.” Nana Xara’s voice sounded cheerful. “And I didn’t really see any need to interfere, as you are growing up so fast.”
For the last sentence, Nana Xara pretended to be getting emotional, and Mila debated using her Law Larva of Shadow to block their connection.
But there was something she needed to ask her master, so she held off on that desire.
“I would have thought you’d take this chance to give out quests so we can more easily get whatever you end up buying at the upcoming auction,” Mila sent. “Why haven’t you?”
“I’m waiting to see what you accomplish.” Nana Xara’s voice, while still cheerful, got a bit more serious. “I can make quests to guide you to do what I want, but I can also make generic quests that you’ve already met the requirements for. You don’t really need guidance at the moment, and making quests with multiple levels of completion, like I’d have to do now as we don’t know for sure if Aalam will successfully kill the Violet Mountain Lord, would force me to give lower all around rewards, so it’s better if I wait.”
“Got it.” Mila thought for a second as she ran, digesting the new information about System quest difficulty and reward limitations. Then she asked, “Do you have any recommendations on making sure the Violet Mountain Lord dies?”
“Not really.” Nana Xara’s voice became fully cheerful again. “From what I can tell, there is about a 95% chance what you already have planned will kill him. Sure, you’re not gaining as many benefits as you could if Aalam killed him personally, but I can understand not taking the risk of staying around longer, so I don’t really have much to add.”
“A 95% chance?” Mila felt her heart start to race faster as she’d been very scared the Violet Mountain Lord would live and create huge problems for them in the future.
“Yeah.” Mila could almost see Nana Xara smiling. “That curse Aalam has prepared is ridiculously powerful. Just that, combined with the plagues, will almost certainly kill the Violet Mountain Lord if he comes back to the planet, even though it will probably take six months to do so.
“This leaves him not coming as the main chance for him to live, but the Violet Mountain Lord is a B rank approaching the end of his life who hasn’t advanced his race yet despite being obviously wealthy. To me, this signifies, whatever his race is, he hasn’t met the requirements for an upgraded advancement, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t prepared the natural treasures to allow that upgrade to happen.
“The thing is, those natural treasures, like the violet titanium quintessence, would be A rank, so he wouldn’t carry them around with him, as they would drastically increase the cost of using the System’s teleportation network.
“For someone in his position, those natural treasures, and things like the violet titanium quintessence which represent a large fraction of his wealth, are the key to having the possibility to live longer. So, there is almost no chance he’ll abandon them unless he thinks his chances of death if he tries are extremely high.
“But you guys sabotaged the soul net, showing you have something you want to hide, very much not something an actual A rank would have to do. Thus, from his perspective, it’s unlikely you’re strong enough to kill him.
“Given what I’ve seen of his personality, after the teleportation platform on Toril was fixed, he almost certainly teleported to the nearest platform to your location and then started flying via starship. And, given his power and the type of ship he’s known to have, he should arrive in about five days if I’m right.”
“Okay.” Mila then focused more of her minds on the senses Aalam was sharing of him building a golem under the excited gaze of the AI and sent, “Aalam, Nana Xara thinks the Violet Mountain Lord will arrive in five days. Will we be ready to leave before that?”
“Sure.” Aalam smiled slightly as he put the last finishing touches on his E rank golem. “But why would we leave when we could kill him in person? That’s not optimal at all.”
* * *
Aalam
The second challenge for the inheritance had been a simpler one, a confirmation that he had enough crafting category skills, and the AI had been impressed by Runescriber, Sensory Domain, and how he was working to advance Triforce Construction.
Then there was the actual crafting challenge.
Steel Swamp Sorin, the original creator of the Violet Mountain Blessed Land, had been a monster god. But what he’d been famous for wasn’t anything to do with killing or war but for his expertise in golems and automation, so the crafting challenge had been to build a functional E rank golem using the god’s designs from scratch within 90 days, something Aalam managed to do in only 20.
When he was done, however, the AI began to talk for several hours.
Of the monster gods of his age, Steel Swamp Sorin had apparently been especially peaceful, more interested in business than war. Yet, as a crafting god, he’d also been one of the weakest in terms of combat, so an A rank cultivator of the time had hunted him down and killed him. The AI didn’t know who it was or whether he or she had advanced to godhood, but it did bore Aalam with a whole lot of very ancient history, mainly around Steel Swamp Sorin’s relationships with other powers from trillions of years ago, most of whom were long dead. And Mila hadn’t allowed him to skip the lecture, the information apparently important to understanding the current status of various gods.
While the AI was talking, it also reactivated quite a bit of the long unused machinery in the blessed land, and, when they were fully activated, Aalam started getting the information he actually wanted.
Steel Swamp Sorin hadn’t expected to die, so the inheritance was more of an automated backup plan than something he’d fully prepared, and this meant there wasn’t much in the way of cultivation resources. Instead, the inheritance included pretty much all the cultivation and artificing knowledge the god had ever learned—such as information on thousands upon thousands of classes Nana Xara had never heard of, especially crafting classes; information on far more monster races than likely even most cultivator gods knew of, including rare and extinct species; and a collection of blueprints from G rank all the way up to those for divine artifacts, even several for automation factories described as better than any others in the universe for their rank at the time of their creation.
Then of course there was the blessed land itself, which Aalam and, due to her role as his chamberlain, Mila had full control over, a god level artifact with many, many abilities.
There were those the Violet Mountain Sect had been making use of for its entire existence—its generation of crystal water, crystal stone, and violet titanium, as well as their higher rank variants; its specialized machinery for converting the primal energy in living beings into primal energy stones; and its ability to raise any E or D rank planet it was attached to up to C rank. But these were just its basic abilities the cultivators were able to unlock.
In the deeper parts of the blessed land there were crafting rooms well beyond anything a B rank force like the Violet Mountain Sect had access to. There were thousands of E to C rank golems which could be used to mine and collect the resources the blessed land generated automatically. And there were several hundred different factories which could be set up for automated creation of artifacts or alchemical products once Aalam figured out how to get them working again.
The blessed land itself could move through space, and with it they could return to Earth in about four months even without teleportation, which was incredibly fast compared to most spaceships in the universe. And, while flying, the blessed land would block out all outside contact, from the System to Nana Xara, while there were also specialized rooms in the blessed land which could do the same even when the blessed land’s portal to the outside world was open, one of which Aalam was planning to give permanently to his sister and Isaiah.
