Arms couldn't help but betray a dejected expression.
He too had never planned to enter this lowly and inferior Goblin Plane personally. If it hadn't been for his infuriation by the delay in the charging of the planar door, he would never have relied on his powerful Physique to force his way through the spatial vortex and come to this accursed place.
It was too late to say anything!
Arms would never have been able to imagine himself running into such a terrifying space storm inside a lowly, small-sized plane. A space furnace explosion of this intensity was equivalent to throwing him into the energy storms in space.
The fact that Arms had been able to survive in that massive explosion was already a testament to the power of his dragon bloodline and the strength of his Physique.
Power, luck, and experience; Arms would have been blasted into pieces in the explosion if he had lacked any one of these factors.
"Adept, I am Third Grade Dragon Lord Arms of the Plane of Rance. If you save me from this place and let me leave safely, I swear by the name of the Dragon God to recompensate your compassion with five… no, ten times my wealth." The typically arrogant and wild Thunder Dragon Arms suddenly behaved in an extremely friendly fashion.
"Oh? You mean… you will repay me with wealth ten times that of the value of a Third Grade Dragon?" The earth elemental was still speaking with its unique booming voice.
Arms face had already turned ashen from the continuous loss of blood. However, it still managed to become even paler upon hearing the opponent's words.
The value of a Third Grade Dragon, and ten times that?!
Would he be able to gather such a terrifying sum of payment even if he skinned his own body, took apart his bones, drained his blood, and collected all his flesh?
His words earlier were only meant to be recompensation for the opponent's 'kind' gesture of saving him. Yet, they seem to be implicitly categorizing him as their property with what they had just said.
It seemed that things were unlikely to be resolved through negotiations, given the vast differences between their perspectives.
Rage filled Arms' heart. He lashed out with his now dirtied and muddied right hand at lightning speed and plunged it deep into the chest of the earth elemental. He then crushed the elementium core within the golem.
Thunder Dragons were variants of the wind element. They were incompatible with earth elementium. As such, Arms didn't choose to devour the creature and instead destroyed it immediately.
This one-meter tall elemental quickly collapsed with the destruction of its elementium core. It returned to dust.
However, this seemed to have sounded the horns of battle. Arms immediately sensed over a hundred elementium fluctuations unique to earth elementals in the soil around him.
Several adept-level earth elementals started to appear in the tunnel he had dug through the ground. They immediately lunged at Arms with rumbling footsteps after they had formed.
Arms was unfazed by such small fry.
He shook his dirt-covered right hand, miraculously turning it into a well-defined dragon claw. He then made grabbing motions in the air, smashing through the chest of an earth elemental with every thrust and retrieving the elementium core within.
Those earth elementals had their cores shattered before they could even get close to Arms. Their bodies disintegrated and fell apart.
Arms suddenly turned back and let out an angered roar, despite how well the battle was going for him.
The skinny body that had been lying in the corner of the tunnel had mysteriously sunk into the earth and vanished before his eyes.
His 'rations'–Dragonborn Zacha–had been abducted by the adepts!
Chapter 548 Magic Spring
Seven minutes later.
Greem met with Second Grade Dragonborn Zacha, who was in terrible state.
It was obvious that the Dragonborn had incredible luck. He had not been too badly polluted by the space energy from the massive explosion. However, that luck of his was also his misfortune. It was what caused him to become Thunder Dragon Arm's rations for survival.
Greem had originally though Zacha to be dead. However, he was surprised to find the dragonborn hanging by his last breath when he fetched him to the surface with the earth elemental.
Greem immediately took out a Potion of Life and poured it into the dragonborn's mouth without any hesitation.
Sadly, while this might be enough to save Zacha's life, it couldn't help the dragonborn regenerate his four limbs and body that had been eaten by the thunder dragon. Further recovery would have to wait until he was brought back to Fire Throne.
Such terrifying wounds would require several months to heal, at the very least.
While there were spells that could hasten the regeneration of flesh, most of those spells took effect by inciting the subject's life force in a moment of crisis. The missing parts of the body still required proper treatment and healing to regenerate once the effect of the spell was over.
Still, a Second Grade dragonborn's exceptional Physique should allow him to regenerate flesh at a much higher rate than an adept with weak Physique, as long as he was fed enough food and energy.
Dragonborn Zacha's life might be hanging by a thread, but he had always maintained consciousness. He even sent a hint of gratitude to Greem with his weak Spirit when Greem saved him from the hands of the thunder dragon.
Even though Greem didn't know how sincere this gratitude was, he still saw the chance of recruiting the dragonborn as a subordinate!
Greem had no time to deal with Zacha right now. He quickly passed the dragonborn to Endor and let her deal with the matter. He, on the other hand, focused all his attention back on the silent battle that was happening underground.
In less than fifteen minutes, nearly two-tenths of the earth elemental army that Greem had gone to great lengths to create had been destroyed. Twenty adept-level earth elementals cost fifty thousand magical crystals each at the very minimum. If they were all put on sale, they could probably fetch around three hundred thousand magical crystals.
Yet, the only result that Greem had gained from the loss of twenty earth elementals was further worsening the exhaustion of the thunder dragon. Arms had finally used up all the lightning power he had been saving over the past month.
The image feeding back from the earth elementals indicated that the Third Grade thunder dragon was about to fall. It seemed just a little bit more effort would cause the titan to collapse. However, Greem didn't dare be careless. He didn't dare to enter the fight personally either. He commanded the earth elementium golems to circle the thunder dragon and attempt sneak attacks when the opportunities presented themselves.
The thunder dragon could not possibly escape with the earth elementals there.
Moreover, under Greem's command, the earth elementals had even collapsed the tunnel behind the thunder dragon. This way they had sealed off Arms' path of retreat.
Greem started to send an endless wave of earth elementals to shout at the dragon now that he had him cornered. He wanted to take this opportunity to bring this terrifying Third Grade thunder dragon into his fold. Sadly, every one of his golem messengers was shredded with a single swipe, and the battle continued.
Greem finally steeled his heart once his multiple attempts had failed. He no longer tried to send messengers to call for the dragon to surrender. Instead, he started to use all his strength to exterminate the isolated Third Grade thunder dragon.
Greem would never have even dared to think such a thought if this had been in the past. However, multiple coincidences and twists of fate had allowed him to run into this massive fish. Greem would never forgive himself if he let an opportunity like this slide past him!
The excavation work on the surface had stopped. All the goblins had dropped the work at hand and silently waited for news.
As the protagonists of the battle, Greem and Billis were hiding in their respective shelters. Greem hid in a small wooden hut while Bil
lis stayed in his tent. Both of them were remotely commanding their subordinates, launching a constant wave of harassment and attacks at the Third Grade thunder dragon stuck in the small space underground.
It didn't matter how strong a thunder dragon was. In the end, it was the sky that was their stage. The underground was fated to be a nightmare for a thunder dragon!
The earth elementals would immediately dive into the small ditch and harass him if Arms attempted to dig his way out. Meanwhile, they would use their affinity with earth elementium to strengthen the hardness of the ground around the ditch. They might not be able to turn the earth to stone, but it would increase the difficulty of digging through it tenfold.
If Arms gave up on digging and turned to attack the golems, then the golems would escape into the earth and occasionally fire earth spikes and create quagmires to entangle the thunder dragon.
The one hundred golems and scorpions circled the thunder dragon while employing this strategy. They took turns to harass the dragon, significantly lowering the elementium consumption of the golems. After all, much like the thunder dragon, the golems also couldn't replenish their elementium supply in the low-magic Goblin Plane.
One side was stronger, while the other was more numerous. Both parties were giving their all in the underground, and the battle would be decided by who was the first to collapse in exhaustion.
It was clear that the thunder dragon was disadvantaged in this aspect!
The hidden battle that followed underground lasted for half a month. Finally, the exhausted Third Grade Thunder Dragon Arms collapsed and became a prisoner of the earth elementium golems.
The joy of capturing a Second Grade Dragonborn and a Third Grade Thunder Dragon almost overwhelmed Greem.
However, there was an even greater surprise waiting for him.
Two of Billis' sting scorpions had actually managed to arrive at the scene of the space furnace explosion by following the tunnels that the thunder dragon had dug into the earth. That place had already turned into a strange energy space. All substance that drifted in there would be disintegrated into unrecognizably fine dust before being expelled again.
The expelled dust was all coated with extremely intense energy radiation. One of Billis' sting scorpion had fallen apart just from being blasted by a pillar of the dust.
From a distance, the energy space looked like a large black stone with a diameter of ten meters. A fine layer of energy dust shrouded the exterior of the energy space. The center of the energy space continuously spewed out a rainbow energy flow, rumbling and crackling as it did so.
This energy flow wasn't as violent and chaotic as when it had just appeared after the layer of dust had filtered it. The energy clashed with the laws of the Goblin Plane, turning into waves of extremely pure magic elementium that merely dispersed into the surroundings.
Billis clearly didn't understand this strange phenomenon, but Greem immediately recognized it for what it was. After all, he practically had an adept encyclopedia in his mind.
[Beep. Discovered a naturally-occurring magic spring. After examination, magic concentration has been determined to be 78.25%. Attributes of said magic are slightly wild and are unsuitable for direct consumption by adepts.]
"Magic spring!" Greem's eyes lit up.
In all seriousness, this was an entirely naturally-occurring magic spring that had not been treated or subjected to any taming.
Even though the cause of its formation was a strange explosion, it perfectly matched all of the descriptions of magic springs in Greem's memory.
The so-called magic spring was only a name that the adepts attached to the phenomenon. In truth, it was a point of energy intersection of outer space and planar space. Here, the wild energies of the outer space would come into contact with the planar space and a strange phenomenon of a rainbow energy flow would appear.
It was the existence of magic springs that allowed the plane to be replenished with energy from outer space, and thus maintain a stable magic index within the plane. It was precisely the lack of wild magic springs in the Goblin Plane that caused the thin concentration of magic elementium within the plane. That was why it had ended up as a notorious low-magic plane.
At this moment, Greem couldn't help but be amazed by the bizarreness of fate!
If the Third Grade thunder dragon knew that a magic spring had been born in the core area of the explosion, he would never have dug upward. He could have stayed within the radius of the magic spring and replenished his lightning power. When that happened, who in the entire Goblin Plane could stop a Third Grade thunder dragon at full might?
Yet it had apparently been utterly terrified by the massive explosion. Arms had only been thinking of fleeing as far away as he could, not knowing that he had walked past an opportunity to turn the tables! An opportunity that fate had arranged for him!
Magic springs were an absolute blessing for powerful magical creatures. On the other hand, they were hazardous and lethal places for people who were too weak.
Even First Grade adepts were too frail for magic springs. It was very likely that they would be assimilated and turned into demon spirits without bodies and only fragments of consciousness if they ventured too close to magic springs. Meanwhile, as a Second Grade adept that had completed the elementiumization of both his body and mind, Greem would not be harmed by the magic spring. Instead, he would be able to feel the immense concentration of magic constantly.
Even if he had exhausted all of his elementium energies in combat, he would only need to stay near the magic spring for five minutes to replenish all of his elementium.
The significance of a treasure like this for an adept was equivalent to an origin relic!
Moreover, Greem remembered a record in a book that stated that such magic springs could be transported through magical means. If he could add this magic spring to the magic generator furnace, whose initial designs had already been completed, then it could potentially boost the efficiency of the magic generator furnace by more than ten times.
Greem stood approximately twenty meters away from the black ball, remotely sensing the internal structure of the magic spring. However, it didn't matter how he tried to sense for it. The cluster of energy space at the center of the magic spring remained a pure black in his mind.
Neither magic probing nor spiritual senses could receive any feedback or reaction from that energy space.
His spirit would be mysteriously devoured the moment it entered the space.
Indeed, devoured; not just gone missing!
Greem stood on the spot for a long time before sighing helplessly.
Magic springs were genuinely mysterious and wondrous constructs. He was still not qualified to discover its secrets with his current power.
He set up a spatial coordinate in the area where the magic spring was located and thought of a way to seal it.
Now, it was Greem's time to wander underground freely!
Greem could navigate the underground world with extreme ease in a way that the Third Grade thunder dragon hadn't been able to. And the one aid he was relying on was his signature helper– the elementium golems.
He had initially intended to pass the task of excavating the Steel Capital to Bug Adept Billis. However, given what he had seen, he had underestimated the value to be found here. Disregarding the planar door that had yet to be found, just what he had discovered here had already exceeded his expectations.
If he could scour this place thoroughly, he might find even greater yields!
Chapter 549 Fleeing Mary
A black shadow rapidly dashed across the night-cloaked Ad Plains, sticking close to the ground as it did so.
The black silhouette was slender and tall, brimming with a seductive charm under the illumination of the round moon in the sky. Alarmingly enough, the seductive figure didn't belong to a human. She had a pair of large and wide gray wings on her back, silent as a phantom as she glided above the ground.
There were no pursuers or oddi
ties behind her, but the owner of this black silhouette seemed to be fleeing in a panic. Much like an anxious bird, she dashed across fields and villages and rivers, never daring to stop for a break.
Even someone of her power would eventually be exhausted after a continuous flight at full speed for several hours.
Whenever she reached this peak of exhaustion, she would dive down into someplace within the forest. There would immediately be commotion from large-sized forest beasts from that area.
However, these growls and howls disappeared as fast as they appeared!
A short moment later, when the black silhouette unfurled her wings and took to the skies once more, two shriveled corpses had been left behind in the forest. The blood within the bodies of these large beasts had been completely drained within a matter of minutes.
At the instant the black form took to the sky, the moon illuminated the face of its owner– a pretty, concerned, and anxious face.
Mary. She was the Vampire Adept Mary whom Greem had sent to monitor Leicester!
Perhaps the odd atmosphere of the night had scared away all nearby beasts, or maybe Mary had been remarkably silent and clean in her hunt. Regardless, the forest quickly turned silent once she had vanished into the darkness in the distance.
Until another strange black shadow descended upon the spot!
There were absolutely no signs of living beings in the forest. Only those with the most delicate of senses could vaguely sense the light in the forest dimming slightly.
A cluster of thin black mist spread throughout the forest as the bright moonlight shone down upon the trees. The fog quickly enveloped the two beast corpses that had been hidden in the bushes.
Two crimson eyes suddenly shone in the black mist, as if its owner had discovered something of interest. This unknown individual immediately turned and stared in the direction that Mary had fled.
A sinister male voice rang out from the mist.
"She actually possesses the smell of my bloodline within her… strange. Could it be an experimental subject that I didn't properly dispose of? No. I must try bloodline summoning once."
Age of Adepts c1-1513 Page 344