The Curator
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Chapter 78: Testing Limits
🕑 Added 2024-11-01 11:34:50 +0000 UTCBack in his room, Thalion immediately continued with his soul cultivation. The meeting was moved to breakfast the following morning, allowing him to spend the whole night on his soul cultivation. The night went by quickly as he worked on his soul without stopping for a moment. Normally, one would gain some experience from body tempering, but after his title, it was close to nothing. Thalion changed his form to the tidecaller serpent to see how his soul looked in this body, and it was not that bad. The parts were in a different order, but they had grown like in his human body, which made sense since it was the same soul after all.
It was already morning, and Thalion spent the last minutes better aligning his soul parts in the serpent body until the butler interrupted him by informing that it was time for breakfast.
"Nice to see you again! How did you sleep?" Seraphina asked Thalion when he entered the great dining room. Annie was already there.
"Very good," Thalion said while sitting down beside Annie.
"Splendid! So, what are your plans for today?" Seraphina asked, curious.
"Hunting, of course," they both answered immediately.
"I will tell the captain to take you to the reefs we hunted yesterday," Seraphina nodded.
"Now, about the political stuff. What can you tell me about Thorwald or Steven?" Seraphina asked them, interested.
"I only heard some stories from Kael and former members of Kael's base. He had tried to kill them after an orc attack, but Thalion had saved them after hunting down two vampires," Annie said with a shrug of her shoulders.
"You hunted down two vampires alone?" Seraphina asked him in surprise.
"They were already injured, it wasn’t really a fight," Thalion said not wanting to dive deeper into that subject. "Thorwald is an ass who does anything for power, and this Steven seems to be very similar from the stories I've heard."
"Good to know," Seraphina commented, deep in thought. "How long do the two of you want to stay?"
"I can’t really leave, our patron said I need to stay by your side," Annie said.
"I will leave after hunting," Thalion said, "but I would like to come by before the teleport to the fourth stage."
"Of course, you are always welcome here," Seraphina said calmly.
They talked a bit more about beasts and the tutorial until Seraphina ended the meeting.
Annie and Thalion both stood on the ship, deep in thought, waiting until the captain had found the reef since they could travel quite far through underwater currents.
"Do you want to make a bet?" Annie asked him with a grin.
"About what?" Thalion asked, intrigued.
"Whoever gets more levels today has to eat a raw snail," Annie happily announced.
"Yeah, no. I won’t get many levels today," Thalion tried to play it down.
"Okay, good luck with the hunt," Annie said sadly.
"You too! Don’t dive too deep. You can’t handle those beasts alone," Thalion said.
"Sure, sure! If we don’t see each other before you leave, can you tell Jakob not to slack off?" Annie asked him with a sad smile.
"Of course! I’ll let him dig for some ant queens," Thalion said jokingly.
"We are here! You have twelve hours, then I will leave," the captain roared, and all the blue robes jumped into the water and disappeared. Thalion followed close after and jumped into the water, switching to the Tidecaller Serpent, and shot down with incredible speed. It was time to test his new form. He completely skipped the first reef and dove deeper for the second one, where the bigger beasts resided. He wasn't confident enough to fight the stronger beasts in the depths since he was already severely underleveled. Maybe it was possible to defeat the big sharks, but he first wanted to get comfortable with his new body and test the skills. Thalion had to watch the blue robes since they didn’t know he was the serpent and would attack him on sight.
He approached a Reef Golem, which was currently smashing a crab into pieces with its big fist. The whole golem was four meters high and looked very tough—in other words, the perfect testing dummy. Thalion activated Aqua Lance and shot a concentrated beam of water at the Reef Golem, ripping the golem into pieces and throwing the body parts back with the sheer force of the skill. "Oh wow, this was better than I anticipated," Thalion smiled. Maybe he could dive deeper.
It took some time until he found another Reef Golem. This time, it was five levels higher than the last one, at level 54. He used his second offensive skill and waterslashed at the golem. The cutting wave shot at the golem like a blade made out of water, cutting the golem in half with some difficulty. The offensive powers of the tidecaller serpent were just insane. It was time to test the defenses. He searched for a bit until he found a shark that attacked him after he bit into its fin and swam away. Thalion stopped, and before the shark could hit him, he activated water shield. The shark, which weighed over two tons, kind of shattered on his shield. The best part was that the shark did not even exhaust or crack his shield one bit.
Thalion thought a bit about the situation; he wanted to find out how strong the shield was, but on the other hand, everything that was strong enough to break the shield would kill him instantly. Well, whatever he was ready for the depths of the oceans. He needed stronger beasts to test his skills, and he was confident that he could flee from any beast. The speed he could reach now was definitely more than the top speed of the marlin, and that fish was already faster than anything he had encountered so far. Before he could dive down, he needed some fresh bait and had one final skill to test.
When Thalion reached a swarm of evolved goliath groupers, a giant fish that was the apex predator of every reef back on earth, he used tsunami breaker. His whole body burned with power as he unleashed a shockwave of water that completely obliterated the seven-meter-long fish as if it had never existed in the first place—not only the fish in front of him but everything around him as well. Not bad! So, his new form was a nuclear weapon. He was ready to test its limits. With such a powerful skill, he should easily be able to kill most beasts in the depths.
Thalion gathered some of the remains of the goliath grouper and dove for the depths. It was time to kill some sharks. To his surprise, the first beast attracted by the blood was not a shark but some kind of sea star that floated up to him. Thanks to his passive skill, the over 15-meter-wide sea star didn’t notice him, and he was able to fire an Aqua Lance at it, cutting it apart without any resistance. However, the sea star still lived and started to reform. So, Thalion had no choice but to make a scene and activated Tsunami Breaker, ripping the sea star into pieces.
"This was easy," Thalion thought. He gathered the parts of the sea star. Leaving the blood in the water to attract more beasts. Another thing he noted was his absolutely ridiculous mana regeneration. Both of his skills together had cost a bit over thirty percent of his total mana, but only minutes later, his mana pool had fully recovered. This form could be his ticket to E grade and the key to escaping the negative side effects of his title. The sea star was at level 56, and he had killed it without any effort. When he killed around thirty more sea stars, he would even level up. The higher the level of the beasts, the more experience he would gain, and his mobile nuclear weapon didn’t really care about the level; it just destroyed.
So, Thalion spent the day near the growing pile of corpses, slowly sinking to the depths and killing every beast that dared to show up. The camouflage of the depths proved more useful than he had thought; many beasts didn’t even notice him at all, which made it much easier to rip them apart with his skills.
The biggest problem he faced right now was that the corpse pile had grown so large that multiple beasts approached at the same time, or he was still in a fight while the next beast already appeared from the depths. Now the beasts even came in tiny swarms. It was quite frightening when five 40-meter-long squids appeared around him, hidden by their camouflage.
It would have almost been too late, but through the extra sense of his title, he had noticed the danger early and was able to activate Water Shield. To his delight, it held off the five giant squids, level 67, long enough for him to charge up an extremely powerful version of Tsunami Breaker that ripped four of the five squids into pieces and badly injured the surviving one.
Before he could finish the large squid, a group of eight sharks approached, each easily twenty meters long, and shortly after, a giant jellyfish. This had all gotten out of hand. New beasts arrived from every direction. It was all-out war.
He ran from a giant barracuda that shot at him like a rocket while he was busy ripping one of the many jellyfish into pieces with Aqua Lance. The barracuda got grabbed by a giant squid that had just appeared in the middle of it all. That camouflage was just so overpowered! Anyway, it was time to leave, but not without his prize.
He tried to gather as many corpses as possible in his spatial ring and shot up for the surface. All in all, it was a very eventful day. In the end, he made great progress and reached Level 41 with every one of his forms, except eagly; it had reached Level 42.
He was even close to the next level up. Killing level 60 beasts was so worth it; when things got out of hand with Kael, the depths of the ocean would be his hunting ground. He exited the ocean and turned into eagly, flying in the direction of Kael's base. Would it be better to stay and gain more levels? Probably yes, but he wanted to use the alchemists and smiths, just in case Kael, Kai, and Sylas were really planning something for him.
Thalion flew through the whole night until he arrived at Kael's base in the early morning. That was when he realized another big perk of his title: he now didn't have to sleep in any of his forms. This title was really something else. If all titles were this awesome, he needed more—but only if they came without any negative side effects.
While hunting in the ocean, he had watched some meetings Kael held, but so far, his name hadn't been mentioned once. He wondered what level Kael and the others had reached. Most guards were close to level 50.
Why did they level this fast anyway? He had always had to kill so much to gain some levels, but the last few days, it felt like all the other survivors made a giant leap in levels. "Was he still able to fight his way out of the base if he got attacked?" Thalion thought.
He was willing to take the risk. He still had his sword with the smith and he wanted to profit from the blood all the people in the base were gathering for him. Time to pay Zyra a visit to get more resources.
"Hey, Zyra, did you miss me?" Thalion greeted the woman sitting behind her desk, working hard on new runes.
"Hi, Thalion! So good to see you. I have prepared so many plants for you," Zyra said happily.
Thalion felt like he had to throw up. He had completely forgotten that Zyra was also planning something sinister for him. This feeling of impending doom grew even stronger when he felt her identify on him.
"Thank you very much. I wouldn't know what I would do without you," Thalion said, trying not to let his true feelings show.
"It was my pleasure; I have another thing for you," Zyra said, pulling out a piece of leather with a rune on it.
"When you lay this piece of leather on the wind crystals, you can put them into your spatial ring," Zyra happily said.
"That's great, but it will take a bit until I fly to the mountains again," Thalion said.
"No worries, just don't forget your favorite alchemist," Zyra said happily.
Thalion left shortly after; it was disgusting how false people could be. She clearly had something planned for him. Without his title, he would have never known. He paid most of the now over thirty alchemists in the street a visit and gathered as many materials as possible, most importantly elixirs.
To his luck, he was loved by the people for his deeds, especially by the alchemists since he freed them from the shapeshifters. This led to him getting way more resources than he had expected, and he happily left the alchemist street on his way to the smith, Lucan.
The sword he had formed so far had absorbed so much mana that it radiated a weak aura. Currently, Lucan was teaching him the many possibilities he had with such fine material. The metal was almost full of mana right now, and he needed to harden it more so it could absorb more mana. Lucan even had bought a scroll for him in the system shop that gave some instructions on rune carving.
Shortly after, they were both happily working on their projects. Thalion really needed to do something for the smith, but he always declined when he wanted to give him materials. The only thing he accepted were the shark’s teeth. He paused his work to keep testing the sword.
It looked awesome, a bit like the silver sword the witcher had. Okay, maybe it looked more clumsy, but he was far from finished. He worked all day on the sword, and when the evening came, he carved new runes into the sword to absorb more mana and left Lucan, who was also going for a drink in one of the three inns of the base.
It really looked like the base was growing fast with every passing day. There could be over three thousand survivors living here. On his way back to his room, he gathered more blood vials. He didn't have much time left since he would meet the others at Kael's base for a nice evening. He had checked in with the spy crystal from time to time, but he hadn't found anything that was suspicious.
Comments
Exaiter
Curious about what theyre planning. Cant really imagine them getting anything out of betraying him, unless their patreons have instructed them 🤔
