Ch196-Jumping Conclusions

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Ch196-Jumping Conclusions

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Even if there wasn’t a point in doing it, Sylver sent Spring ahead anyway. The shade wouldn’t be able to get past the barrier, but at the very least he would be able to inform Sylver if there were people outside the sect.

Through Mora, Sylver at least knew they hadn’t attacked yet. If she was in pain, Sylver would know, their connection wasn’t strong enough for any kind of complex thought at the moment, but he would be able to feel it if she was hurt or damaged even if he was in another realm.

Currently, Sylver had given up on being secretive about his abilities and was openly riding on Ulvic while empowering the wolf shade to such an extent that he also had to spend mana repairing the beast’s legs. But it was worth it, the shade was covering the distance it had taken Sylver several hours to walk, in mere minutes.

Spring returned with the news that there was blood splattered just outside Faust’s sect. He couldn’t see what was happening inside, but there was smoke coming out from the top of the sect’s barrier.

Sylver urged Mora to get ready, to prepare for a fight, but the creature wasn’t reacting to his commands. Sylver stopped trying, and focused on making Ulvic as fast as possible, while he worked on reattaching his arms, and did his best to piece his face together as much as he could.

His eyeballs had thankfully been largely unscathed, his skull protected the majority of his brain matter, and miraculously, the vast majority of the damage was cosmetic, apart from all the teeth Sylver was missing.

As he essentially smashed one of his clone heads to pieces and had the pieces he needed float into position using [Dead Dominion] Sylver wondered if there was any point in continuing with this farce of appearing human.

If he simply wrapped his skull in bandages, as some of his shades were, there wouldn’t be any question as to whether or not he was alive, everyone would assume he simply had some sort of horrific injury.

Although the idea rubbed him the wrong way and laid waste to all the time Sylver had spent maintaining his appearance, he didn’t have the time to be focusing on making his skin appear life-like. Sylver stored everything he wasn’t going to use in his [Bound Bones] storage, and used [Necrotic Mutilation] soaked bandages to cover his head, and did the same for his shoulders, forearms, hands, and torso.

The rest would be covered by his robe anyway, but Sylver needed that cohesion in the event he was touched by that strange lead-like wood. If his arm was kept in place using nothing but magic, there was a good chance it would fall off, whereas muscles, tendons, and bandages, would provide enough cohesion for him to continue using the limb.

Someone screamed as Ulvic ran past them, but they very likely couldn’t even tell it was a wolf, at best it would look like a dark elongated blur.

There was a great deal of space inside the land around the Schlagen mountains. Similar to actual countries and continents, there were small circles that were populated, connected to one another by roads. As Ulvic reached the area that belonged to one of the sects and was the start of the “city,” Sylver returned the shade to his shadow and used [Fog Form] instead.

Unlike Arda there weren’t any convenient pipes in the ground for Sylver to travel through, so he had to resort to traveling just above the roofs of the buildings. The interference the Ki barriers created made it difficult to move, but it was still significantly faster than Sylver running using his legs.

***

As Sylver’s fog passed through the cracks in the door, he materialized on the other side, with his ax in one hand, and a bundle of explosives in his other.

Faust choked on the tea he was drinking and struggled to catch his breath as it went down the wrong hole, and he couldn’t stop coughing. Sylver’s hearts were racing as he looked around the mostly untouched courtyard, and saw smoke rising from the large makeshift fire pit, that was being used to grill a bunch of meat and vegetables.

Mora’s completely relaxed emotional state helped Sylver calm himself down, as he made the ax disappear, and did the same for the explosives. He very calmly walked over to where Faust and his sect were sitting around a fire pit full of glowing coals, and waited for the completely unharmed cultivator to finish coughing.

Sylver continued looking around while he waited, and could now see that some of the sect members were wearing better armor, were armed with a proper sword, and a couple had a small piece of red rock in their hands. They were all frozen in place and were staring at Sylver.

“Your animal protected us,” one of the kids said, as Faust nodded while he continued coughing.

Faust knocked on his chest a couple of times and started to speak.

“Everyone is ok, we handled it,” Faust explained, as Sylver sat down near the man, and pulled his hood down.

He could see a couple of the kids were caught off guard by the bandages around his head, but everyone chose not to bring them up. Including Faust.

“She killed three of them with one rock, and the rest were so painfully unprepared that the fight was over in less than a minute. They came here ready for witches, and were instead met by a seven-legged horse spider thing, that used its web like a slingshot,” Faust explained, as he continued patting himself on the chest, and gestured towards the bronze kettle sitting on top of a couple of coals.

“Are you going to be attacked again?” Sylver asked, and Faust just shrugged his shoulders.

Sylver's fear and anger had been vacated from his body the way someone would tip a bucket over, and right now he just felt empty, which in turn made him appear and sound calm.

“Not by these guys. Half are dead, and the other half are… I don’t know what she’s doing to them, but the sound she’s making suggests it isn’t something good. But to answer your question, probably. The ideal scenario would have been to defeat them without killing anyone, and maybe negotiate, but my priority was keeping my sect safe, and her priority was to kill the intruders,” Faust explained.

Sylver looked towards the area where Mora had asked for Sylver to build her 2 stone pillars, behind the house, and was informed by Spring that there were several human-shaped cocoons hanging all over the place.

“I’m going to guess they were all carrying jade around, for some reason?” Sylver asked, with a gesture at the barbecue, and the red and green sand sprinkled all over Faust’s legs.

Faust reached over to his left, and after quietly asking for permission, took the sword inside the boy’s scabbard, and lightly tapped the hilt with his palm. The fabric wrapped around the hilt unraveled, and Sylver saw that there were several bright red crystals embedded into the wood.

“I’m in fighting shape thanks to them. Maybe not enough for someone level 300 or higher, but with her acting as backup, who knows?” Faust asked, and gestured towards where Mora was, as he returned the sword to the boy.

“Do you know which sect they’re from?” Sylver asked.

Faust nodded his head.

“They’re all from the Blue Mongoose. According to the boy, they make their living by hunting the few monsters that rely on magic. And as it turns out, also hold a very serious grudge against witches or people they perceive to be witches. Bottom line is, their sect leader is only level 250. And even if their whole sect tried to attack us, we can take them,” Faust explained.

“Where is their sect located?” Sylver asked, but Faust shook his head.

“It’s better if we wait, so we have more time to heal and grow. I realize this isn’t your fault for appearing witch-like, but there was a reason I asked you to stay low-key. We’re past that, so now all we can do is hope we collectively become powerful enough to defend ourselves,” Faust explained, and Sylver asked something that was bugging him about the man.

“You were barely standing on your feet a couple of hours ago?” Sylver asked.

Faust looked, and felt, significantly healthier and more alive than he had been when Sylver left.

“I was. But now I can stand on my feet just fine. And if it’s all the same to you, I would prefer not talking about it,” Faust explained in a slightly lowered voice.

Sylver noticed at this point that Faust was wearing gloves and that he had wrapped bandages around his forearms, over his sleeves, so that no skin was visible. Sylver leaned towards the man and whispered so only he would hear him.

“You’re cultivating negative Ki, aren’t you?” Sylver asked, and the fact that Faust flinched so hard some of the tea he was holding spilled onto his pants was answer enough.

Faust turned his head to stare at Sylver, and if anyone else had looked at him the way Faust did just now, Sylver would have at the very least punched them.

“I would prefer not to talk about it,” Faust repeated in a perfectly calm, but impossibly tense, voice.

Sylver did his best not to make his words sound like a threat, but couldn’t tell if he had succeeded or not.

“I need you to tell me this isn’t going to become a problem,” Sylver whispered politely.

Sylver could see that Faust wanted to say something bad, but the impulse disappeared as he remember who it was he was speaking to right now.

“I know what I’m doing Syl… You have my word this won’t hinder you, or get in the way of your goal, it will only help,” Faust explained, but refrained from looking Sylver in the eye as he spoke.

Which, if Sylver was remembering right, was perfectly normal, given the circumstances.

Another reason as to why negative Ki cultivators always ended up summoning a mother fucking demon, was because they mistakenly assumed that “demonic cultivator” meant that their power came from demons.

Sylver wasn’t entirely certain as to where that name came from, but he’d heard it enough that he knew it wasn’t just a local thing. He also knew that the vast majority of positive Ki cultivators considered negative Ki cultivators to be the absolute most despicable creatures on Eira. Worse than witches, even worse than undead.

And if Faust’s body language was to be believed, he held that very same opinion.

Sylver wasn’t familiar enough with cultivator culture to know exactly how ashamed the man was, or why he even felt the need to be ashamed, but at the end of the day, Sylver trusted Faust.

And if Faust said it wasn’t a problem, it wasn’t a problem.

The whole point of Sylver recruiting people to work under him was precisely so he could have someone to delegate responsibility onto. And part of that involved trusting the people in question to handle things Sylver couldn’t handle or wasn’t an expert in.

“Alright… I’m going to see what Mora is doing, and then I’m going to leave. I’ll try to be quick, but I might be gone for a couple of days. I’m going to leave a dagger with you, and I’m going to attach a shade to it. If at any point something happens and you need me, throw the dagger outside the sect’s barrier, and I will come rushing back,” Sylver explained and got the barest nod from Faust.

Sylver did as he said, and gave the man one of his 16 daggers, and placed a shade with very specific instructions into the dagger’s shadow.

***

As Sylver approached Mora, he could feel that there was something wrong with the corpses she was currently feasting on. For starters, most of them weren’t corpses, but calling someone with so much brain damage that there was 0 chance of recovering “alive” didn’t sound right.

They had a heartbeat, but apart from that, they were dead.

Sylver found his companion in a very odd position, and now had a better understanding of why exactly he was so confused by her responses when he had been running back.

She was laying on her back, inside a very well-made hammock, and her cylindrical tongue was lazily sucking out the liquid of a deflated human-shaped cocoon.

And as Faust had rightly said, the sound she made wasn’t the most pleasant. It was similar to the sound a dog made when drinking water, except there was an unmistakable fizzing and bubbling noise, likely due to the acid she had filled the cocoon with.

Mora leaned towards Sylver and looked at him with her half-asleep eye. She had already eaten so much that she was tired from it, but carried on anyway.

“You did an excellent job. I’m proud of you,” Sylver said towards the 7 legged monster.

She very awkwardly blinked at him and struggled to comprehend as to why exactly Sylver was praising her. Mora gestured with her silver-tipped hoof towards the bodies further away from her, the ones she hadn’t damaged too much, other than strangling them with her thread.

She was saving them for “desert,” but now that Sylver was here, she wanted to share.

“Thank you for the offer, but no,” Sylver said, as Mora did the equivalent of a ‘your loss’ shrug at Sylver through their connection.

Aside from the fact that they likely didn’t have enough mana to bother with, Faust had also fucked their souls up.

In a way, Sylver couldn’t quite understand.

By all rights, they should have been perfectly fine, but there was something fundamentally wrong with them. Damage on a soul was normal, damage on a recently killed soul was normal, excessive damage due to a gruesome/terrifying death was normal, but this…

True to the name, this honestly looked like the kind of thing a demon would do.

Something had been ripped out of them, but not in a way a death mage would rip something out of a soul…

Sylver made a mental note to get as much information out of Faust as possible, regarding how exactly he had managed to do what he did when he was ready to talk about it.

“Do you need anything?” Sylver asked his horse-like companion, but she just continued quietly draining the predigested liquid out of the corpse-filled cocoon.

She lazily shook her head, and all Sylver got from her was that she was content for the moment. And a little sleepy.

“Alright then… As you were,” Sylver said as he left.

***

With the metaphorical cat out of the bag, Sylver wasn’t too worried about people seeing him riding Ulvic.

Especially since he wasn’t riding on top of the wolf, but was instead traveling as a cloud of fog, inside the hollowed-out wolf’s stomach. Ulvic’s speed was largely unnoticed, as Sylver no longer had a need to stick to the main road and the river, and instead had the wolf travel straight towards the swamp.

When they arrived at the spot Sylver had been attacked, he sent the wolf back into his shadow and materialized near the first corpse.

Although he had been bullshiting, and hoping his pursuers would interpret his words as a threat and attack him, so he could claim self-defense in front of Ria, Sylver sadly turned out to be right.

Aside from their clothing being shredded from the initial explosion, there were now several fist-sized moths eating what little remained. Giant leaches inhabited the inside of the dead man’s mouth, some kind of bee-looking thing was eating his hair, a blood-colored worm was wrapped around his visible spine, and his lower half was missing.

Going by the way the ground around him had been disturbed, something had ripped his legs off and dragged them away.

Aside from the damage, which was extensive enough that Sylver wouldn’t even bother raising them as undead, there was also the small issue that these fuckers didn’t have a single drop of mana in their desecrated bodies.

And as a cherry on top, their fancy anti-magic wood sticks didn’t have any fucking jade in them.

After waiting for the shades to thoroughly search the corpses, Sylver discovered only one thing of interest.

There was a bounty on his head.

If someone were to bring his head to the Blue Mongoose sect, they would be rewarded with a whole single gram of blue jade. Sylver’s understanding of this area’s economy wasn’t concrete enough to know whether or not he should be insulted, so he took it as an insult just to be safe.

When Faust was ready those, possibly, underestimating and undervaluing fuckers would be dealt with.

As Sylver stared at his very poorly drawn portrait, which made it look like he was a very ugly woman, he felt the ground beneath his feet shudder. He didn’t bother rolling up the parchment and simply vanished it into his [Bound Bones] storage.

He turned towards the source of the vibration, or at least the giant soul he assumed was responsible for it, and saw what could only be described as a half-toad, half-man creature.

[Slime Frog – Great Siphon – 166]
[HP: 244,913 – 98%]
[MP: 0 – 0%]
[Stamina: 40,454 – 62%]
[Corpse – Common]
[Soul – Common]

Sylver just looked at the approaching creature. It was currently crawling on its 4 legs, but Sylver could tell by the shape of the spine it was about to stand up, or more likely, jump. Its eyes were bigger than Sylver’s head was, and it was twice as tall as he was while laying down, and maybe twice as wide as it was tall.

It was about the size of two large wagons placed next to each other. Its feet were webbed, but the “fingers” were significantly longer than a normal frog’s and had small stumpy claws at the tips.

The frog’s throat started to swell, and the stretched flesh changed color from dark green, to a somewhat disgusting, unhealthy vomit yellow.

Sylver summoned the list that friendly barkeep had given him, and consulted it, to check if there was anything worth taking from this thing.

“It’s your lucky day frog!” Sylver said as he disappeared the list, and looked up at the ballooned-up monster.

“I don’t feel like dealing with whatever vile nonsense you use to fight, so you’re free to fuck off!” Sylver offered the creature, with a dismissive wave of the hand.

It continued swelling up its throat, and with every passing second, reduced its life expectancy from centuries, to years, to months, to weeks, to days, and by the time its throat started to make a gurgling sound, minutes, tittering on seconds.

An enormous glob of gelatinous liquid exploded out of the frog's mouth, a revolting mixture of white, yellow, and mossy green, and flew at Sylver with such speed and intensity that he was fairly certain just the force behind it would be enough to fuck him up.

Let alone whatever chemical properties that nastiness held.

Somewhat lazily, Sylver traveled through the fog he had spread around himself, and he materialized a few steps away from the edge of the area the slime was flying through. It flew past him and should have kept flying a fair distance away, but instead, the liquid stopped midair and extended a tendril towards Sylver.

He once again traveled through the fog he had been spreading out since the start, and when he materialized as far away from the frog, and the liquid, as he could manage, he saw that the fucker was preparing another shot.

Sylver’s lack of reliance on his eyes meant he had one “eye” on the frog, and another on the slime it had spat out. If he had continued to focus on the frog, he would have missed the fact that slime wasn’t trying to catch him, and was instead spreading out, to most likely entrap him in a large slime bubble.

Sylver gestured towards the creature and snapped his fingers at it.

He could see it in its eyes, a moment of utter confusion, as it waited for something to happen, but nothing did. As Sylver crossed his arms over his chest, the frog continued building up slime in its throat, and the slime behind Sylver continued spearing around him, in a dome.

As the frog’s throat reached its apex, something happened.

A giant four-armed shade appeared underneath the frog, in the blind spot under its blown-up throat. The combined Dai and Sho shade swung its overly large blade at the creature’s stretched tight skin, and surprisingly, couldn’t so much as scratch it. The blade’s sharp edge harmlessly slid off the frog’s throat like a razor would glide along a mirror.

The shade’s attempt to stab the creature with that very same sword, proved equally futile, as they couldn’t pierce the shiny, smooth, slimy, and slippery skin.

Sylver just looked at it, and very suddenly the realization that he was about to fight a large frog, spitting phlegm at him, stopped being somewhat fun and interesting, and instead just pissed him off.

Sylver lifted his right hand towards the smug animal and pointed at it with his pointer finger.

He pointed at the frog’s feet, and then quickly flicked his finger upwards.

Slime exploded everywhere out of the frog’s sliced open throat pouch and sprayed the blood-tinted liquid in a giant white, yellow, green, red, cloud.

Sylver once against moved through his fog, via [Fog Form] and materialized directly behind the frog, and avoided the cloud completely.

To his surprise, the cut wasn’t that deep, from this angle Sylver could see that it barely cut two hand widths into the beast’s face. The creature turned around in a single hop, and stared at Sylver with so much hate, that Sylver almost took offense.

“You should feel lucky you get to die by my hand!” Sylver shouted at the creature, but his heart wasn’t in it. The frog wasn’t responsible for Sylver being in a position to fight it, Sylver was angry at something completely unrelated to the poor amphibian.

As Sylver lifted his hand again and was further disheartened by the fact that the flesh around his pointer finger had been burned away, the fucking frog disappeared.

Thankfully Sylver wasn’t a moron, and looked at the direction things that jumped well tended to disappear into, and found the partially sliced amphibian high, high, in the sky, with its body angled directly at Sylver.

Sylver just stood there, looking at it, and tried his best not to think too much about the circumstances that led to him having to take a giant frog seriously.

Sylver looked down at his hand and looked at the small rodent-like shade that had appeared in it. He rubbed the creature’s head, and then unceremoniously, tossed it towards the nearest puddle he could see.

The frog scrunched up its face and body, and as Sylver had predicted, its tongue shot out of its mouth, like a coiled spring, and disappeared through the moist dirt Sylver was standing on a second or two ago.

From the spot where Sylver had materialized, he saw that the tongue was barbed, and unsurprisingly, slathered in poison. Sylver stood where he stood with his shoulders slouched, and with one hand up near his face, pinching the bridge of his nose.

As the frog landed and was probably planning on shooting its tongue at Sylver again, it instead splashed into the “dirt” and in its confusion couldn’t figure out what was happening. Sylver’s shade, the aptly named Cory, had taken command of several tons of water, and at Sylver’s suggestion, turned the dirt Sylver had been standing on, into the equivalent of quicksand.

The frog struggled for a second or two and then did what frogs naturally did, and tried to kick the water to swim. Except it found the water near its feet moving with its feet and didn’t provide enough resistance for the frog’s body to move so much as an inch.

After that, all reason left the creature’s mind, and it started frantically kicking its feet against the flowing dirt water Cory was controlling. Sylver had planned to calmly walk over to the trapped creature, and then gradually keep cutting through its skull using low-level abyss magic, but it surprised him.

The slime that had been gradually turning into a dome lost its shape and flowed towards the frog. It forced its way through Cory’s mud water and provided a sort of ladder structure for the frog to climb on. Once it had both feet on the slimy ladder, the frog exploded out of the water, and in the process, got lucky and hit Cory, and killed him.

Sylver once again looked up at the creature, and the two just stared at one another. He could feel the fear in its soul, although fear didn’t feel like the right word for the emotion the frog was experiencing. It had lived so long as a predator, the concept of being prey was completely foreign to it.

Its skin was thick and slimy enough to make teeth and claws useless, and everything that tried to attack it from a range was usually handled by the controlled liquid phlegm. Which normally poisoned those with resistance to corrosive attacks, or melted them into nothing, for those with poison resistance.

It moved the ladder-shaped slime in a wave across the area Sylver was standing, and as it prepared to move the slime up into the air, to bounce off of, and run away, but Sylver appeared midair a couple of meters away from it.

They locked eyes, for a split second, as the frog shot its tongue out of its mouth, and the barbed flesh harmlessly passed through Sylver. But the frog smiled at the Sylver-shaped cloud, as it felt that it caught something, and with a triumphant shiver, the creature yanked its tongue back into its mouth.

[Slime Frog (Great Siphon) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Mirage (III) Proficiency increased to 99%!]

Sylver continued floating in the air for a few minutes, as he watched the various pieces of frog’s torn apart exploded carcass fall towards the ground in a gory rain of blood, slime, and what Sylver could only guess were, hopefully, unfertilized eggs.

Sylver permitted gravity to take hold of him and fell towards the ground. Once he landed he used [Dead Dominion] in combination with [Necrotic Mutilation] to gather up the frog flesh, and converted it into something useful.

With a large sphere of [Necrotic Mutilation] floating above his head, Sylver consulted his inner compass and made his way deeper into the swamp.

“Not bad for a warmup,” Sylver said to no one in particular.

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