landbeastnovel Chapter 772
Chapter 772
With my Noble Vibrations completely suppressed, I just appear as a 20-meter-tall demon floating through the sky back toward the Ellipsia Citadel.
By the end of my week getting used to the sludge of corruption, I was able to push past its suppressive properties.
–
What felt like a tight, heavy lead blanket over my eyes and entire body at first, became much easier to sense through overtime, like a sea of clear gel.
While my self-regeneration and absorption true core ability were pushed to the limits in order for my body not to succumb to the pressure or poison of the sea, physical pain doesn't really bother me much anymore.
I've become quite numb to this sensation, actually, as subconsciously I know I'm nowhere near death, so the pain signals that would usually be blaring throughout my full body don't bother to go off anymore.
This is the result of the large amounts of low-quality ether flooding into my system, compounding with the memories of more and more past lives of the enemies I've killed over the last few weeks.
That Cyclops and Andras Vermillion really took a toll on my mind that I didn't realize fully until midway through this portion of training.
When adding up Drako's memories and the Goblin King as well, over 20 thousand years of life experience sit dormant in the back of my mind.
The hundreds of thousands of years worth of memories from the other Demonic Beasts around the central peak add up as well, but most of them are just mindless battles, and incoherent dark millenia filled with madness. While some battle instincts are transferred, there are not many life lessons or much useful strategic information that can be used.
So, even though the mental strain put on myself to start fresh and relearn how to control and optimize my Noble Vibrations in that clouded pool of darkness should have pushed me to the edge; It really doesn't seem that difficult with this new range of perspectives I have molding my subconscious.
Organizing my thoughts, memories, and intentions to stay on the path I've chosen was the true test while beneath that black sea.
Now, after successfully mutating my body and mind again to breathe through that disgusting waste pit and filter its toxic bits out of my being while keeping the pure ether, my own ether refinement deep within my mind grows far more efficient.
Every time more sludge came in through my pores, pure ether from my pool of stores was released subconsciously to handle the load, and while accepting new ether into my mental pool, I refined the existing stores over and over during the process.
Unknowingly, while this happened on autopilot, my mind was focused on my Noble Vibrations and controlling the broken pieces of Citadel, I was refining ether. It is not as efficient as the clear elixir Ember granted me as a gift that is still in my storage unused, this refinement is very similar.
–
While I can't test out my Noble Vibrations just yet, my ether senses have certainly improved.
I know this for a fact when I pass through the first ether surveillance bubble around the outer limits of Ellipsia.
Before, I had to focus on the strands of ether and actively think about deactivating and manipulating certain parts of the machine to float through undetected.
Now, it's even more simple than breathing.
Just the thought of altering an ether command is enough to have it done without lifting a finger or even looking its way.
When I finally touch down on the outer edge of the Citadel, I no longer have to shut off full city blocks in order to stand anonymous.
The Citadel's automatic surveillance system is far easier to manipulate now, so I don't have to resort to such crude tactics.
Instead of creating random blackouts, I continuously edit out the visuals where I walk through the streets. With a light layer of ether around my body and the simple alterations of commands imbued in millions of ether strings, not even a fluctuation can be sensed in the internal system.
Not even the demonic servants constantly monitoring every block of the Citadel know I've returned.
My perception easily reaches through the entire floating structure, and as heads turn my way while floating through the streets, I alter the visuals of what is being transmitted to the surveillance systems to make it seem as though the Lords spotting me are just going about their daily lives and not eyeing me with fear.
I am truly a ghost, and can feel every humming ether command on this Citadel ready to be altered to my wildest imagination like clay.
There is only one message I send to a single servant while slowly floating toward the central tower.
Afterward, my entire focus is on the massive structure full of ether, mana, demonic energy divine threads, unique blood-bonded teleportation systems, and a very subtle signature of my Noble Vibrations rippling through it.
While I am not exerting any Noble Vibrations out on the environment, that doesn't mean I can't receive the data from my prior work.
In fact, I'm far more sensitive to the intricacies of my craft.
A few minutes go by as I float around the tower, leaving trails of demonic energy behind while inspecting every single layer with a fully focused and refined gaze.
Knowing what I know now, I'm quite impressed by my past self just a week ago for pulling off such an extensive, intricate, and delicate craft with such little experience in massive structure manipulation.
While it would have been fine to leave it exactly how it was, I make minor tweaks all over the structure, injecting about a million low-quality ether worth of structural support and additional automation commands into the walls of the contraption to suit my professional satisfaction.
My mind scans the tower a few hundred more times while I wait high up in the sky, out of sight from any average Lords, up near the top floor with my arms crossed and a slight grin on my face in silence as the green clouds slowly pass by all around. That is, until Rukor arrives, answering my call from a moment ago.
"You're back, sir. I've completed the task of purchasing as many worlds as I could with the specifications you outlined. The entire balance has been spent, plus the additional ether collected from this week's tax collection."
I nod, opening up the side of the private top floors.@@@@
"Very good."
So, instead, Raven uses the rest of her time back in the cultivation chamber gathering up more yellow divine threads. This is to saturate her blades and resaturate the last bit of her core that she sacrificed in order to win her battle against this king.
–
Down below on the Demonic World, the commanders search every single crater from Arie and Raven's battles, collecting corpses and artifacts.
They even go back and double-check the other two-thirds of the world to see if they missed any artifacts or lingering demonic beasts.
However, Abby stays by the throne.
She doesn't dare to touch it again, or even scan it from afar, as she knows very well cyan divine threads are a threat that not even the Rising Emperor has faced yet...
Messing with a power like this is a death wish.
Though, the thousands of Wyvern and Demon skeletons that surround this throne are a different matter.
Alveron and Monk both want to take the bones and soul weapons apart piece by piece to dissect any and all meaning out of them, but as Abby continues to float around this battle frozen in time, she continues to get more and more flashbacks of the real battle that took place here.
It's very strange.
The images of Wyverns and Demons fighting aren't even from the eyes of the Wyvern she talked with in the desert.
These scenes are from all the way across the world and through the eyes of many of the fighters on this battlefield right now.
No one else but she can come this close to the decaying noble bones, and she knows that she'll soon leave this world, so the healer does something unexpected.
She grabs her glowing green staff and borrows the item storage skill from the Rising Emperor to amplify its range and ability.
A massive ring-shaped storage portal appears beneath the entire battlefield and allows all of the radiation-emitting statues of a frozen war in the past to fall into a true state of suspended animation within her system.
She allows the World Wide Connectivity system to store these artifacts as individual items and sends the data to Alveron, Monk, and Bri; but insists that she holds onto the true artifacts for safekeeping.
Following this event, Abby returns to her cultivation moon base too.
Though, not much cultivation is really done...
She just sits in the center of the yellow room with her eyes closed, letting the black staff slowly spin around her, with a look on her face as though she's in deep thought.
–
Meanwhile, Maria's cultivation chamber has been restocked with divine fragments three more times in the last seven days.
None of the footage sending messages back to the moon base has been able to properly send any usable information back.
The size of the corrupted portions of the files grows, as all the energy readings around her divine core and soul energy core send back nonsensical data that doesn't add up.
Temperatures in her chamber have dropped down to levels that should only be possible in deep space, and a royal blue aura has begun to glow around the outside of her body.
She is pulling a full 4% of stats and emitting a terrifyingly strong mana control radiation signature.
It has consistently been fracturing 4-5 walls out that have had to be constantly rehealed. However, with Arie's aura reaching 26 walls out, and the soul weapons bonding fracturing over 30 walls for both Arie and Raven, these single-digit numbers don't seem like much.
Her divine core has not shown any signs of collapsing.
Everyone has trust in her that she knows what she's doing, but one would expect the process to move along much faster than this...
Maria hasn't even activated her 3rd Ranked Up Buff to aid in the process like she said she would.
If it's taking three months to gather these threads and it hasn't even compressed her True Core yet, then it is an even greater mystery how she'll saturate it in time...
–
While it seems another day will go by with no more clues or progress in Maria's cultivation, a series of notifications ring in everyone's ears within the various moon bases.
It's the new addition of 188,403 worlds to the World Wide Connectivity System, and over a hundred trillion new links of loyalty boosting the amount of borrowed stats available to the Rising Emperor, and of course, in turn, the generals.
With the flood of new and confused system users being added to the forums and markets, everyone borrowing stats gets an instant rise in power by over three times.
The surveillance panels of the cultivation base holding Maria start to light up with many colorful warnings, as the flow of divine threads becomes extremely chaotic, suddenly being pulled inward toward the blue ice mage faster than they're being circulated through the chamber.
Simultaneously, the mana control aura in the room from her natural existence triples in strength, which in turn is multiplied by the divine threads tethering her to reality.
More and more walls begin to shake and fracture as her aura expands, and the gravity she exerts on the base around her continues to increase.
Her burst makes it out to the 21st wall, and the center chamber she sits in now begins to freeze solid making it harder to inject fresh divine threads into the middle room. Alveron frantically triggers system commands to restock the base with another load of divine fragments even though the last restock was less than 12 hours ago.