NOVEL NEXT Chapter 49: Acceptable Targets
Mila
There was one big advantage to having Aalam unconscious: he wasn’t using his own resources. Aalam’s resources were more abundant than hers, as they had the same soulstructures while every single one of his stats was higher, and, as he was in his own Territory, his regeneration rate was more than double her own.
She couldn’t take his resources without his permission, but, with their stronger bond, she could take the excess resources generated by his regeneration. And, as they would otherwise dissipate, there was no loss to Aalam.
All three of her new illusion skills, which her main mind was focusing on as she ran through the forest, only used mana, as did her new Life Death Detection skill. So, to make use of the extra resource regeneration she had access to from Aalam, she also practiced with her qi and psyforce. One of her dumber minds used her qi and Artifact Enhancement to empower the Twin Dragons in spear form and one of her intelligent minds used her psyforce to practice with Aalam’s Telekinesis skill using one of the needles from the Left Hand of the Runescribe.
Her other dumb mind monitored her senses for potential danger and her final intelligent mind kept studying the legacies in the Twin Dragons.
For the first hour of running through the night, she focused on the legacy of illusions, her first legacy from the Weaponsmaster. She was closest to reaching peak grade with her Law Egg of Hologram and, given her new skills, that Law Egg was going to be her most useful in combat for the near future, so it was a good use of her time.
Then, as she was already quite close and her new skills gave her several novel ideas, she managed to advance after only a single hour.
Congratulations!
Your Law Egg of Hologram has advanced to peak grade.
Your soul is affected by your understanding of Laws.
Agility + 8, Perception + 8, Magic +16, Spirit +8, Soul +8
Mila then began to focus on the legacies of The Healer and The Reaper, which also contained quite a bit of information on most other Laws of life and death, and, about an hour later, she entered into the region controlled by the rebels. With her Agility, Perception, and Spirit stats at 175, 180, and 226 respectively, she was well above normal humans, who would average 3 in each, so her movement and reaction speeds were superhuman. The world record running speed for humans was a little less than 45 km/h, running on flat ground and maintained for only a few seconds. With her Endurance and Vitality also at superhuman levels, however, she could maintain more than double that speed for several hours even while moving through a jungle at night and practicing with her skills.
It was kind of terrifying.
The planet was only so big, and she was only going to get faster, yet she could already run at highway speeds through a dense jungle. Over open plains, she’d be able to move even faster. And someone like Roland, who gained more than twice the agility she did per level, could move even quicker.
She hadn’t really thought about it before, but wars with superhumans wouldn’t be like medieval warfare at all, despite the weaponry being similar, but like modern warfare with nukes and fighter jets. Individual combatants could move too fast and hit too hard if given a bit of time to use larger techniques, so things like numbers and supply lines weren’t anywhere near as important as in wars back before mana. And this was only at F rank.
She quickly made her way to one of the major cities in the region, its population much larger than Eshna, housing more than 200,000 before the start of the integration, and she didn’t like what she saw.
As she expected was happening in most cities on both Hira and Earth, a large societal gap had formed between those natives without the talent to ever reach F rank and those who’d been taken away by the System. On Earth, it wouldn’t be as bad, as over 99% of the population were naturally talented cultivators, but on Hira that ratio seemed more like 4%.
96% of the population didn’t have advancement criteria for their race as they were Inferior grade humans and would thus require high grade resources to ever raise their race to F rank, the first step on a path to power. Yet the other 4% could do so simply by killing 3 G rank monsters, the advancement criteria for Common grade humans.
This created a large difference in power given how many stats even a level 1 F rank cultivator gained, and things were even further exacerbated by the new environment. When a planet underwent integration, the rising levels of mana would start to transform some of the animals and plants into monsters, and cultivators were needed to keep them from treating humans as food.
Like with her, most monsters could extract more energy from sentient races than other monsters, and this included those unable to ever pass G rank.
As a result, at least according to Nana Xara, authoritarian or oligarchical power structures almost always developed during integrations, especially apocalypse style ones, with the most powerful cultivators on top, the rest of the cultivators below, and then the normal populace at the bottom. Whatever social structure existed before would generally be torn down, as talent in cultivation rarely had any correlation with status in a manaless world.
In most cases, however, the worst things got was that the normal populace was treated with mostly indifference and not protected, anyone pretty taken to serve those in power and the rest left to starve.
This city ruled by the rebels, however, was so much worse.
Using Trickster’s Guise and qi, Mila’d modified her body, darkening her skin and modifying her features slightly to look like a native commoner. Then she’d used the Trickster’s Guide skill and mana to put an illusion over herself, making her look more plain.
After just a few minutes of walking around, even though it was a couple hours past midnight, she’d already seen 3 different beastmen performing sacrificial rituals on members of the populace to increase their own power, and there were a lot more beastmen than she’d have thought.
The original rituals to become beastmen had been conducted before the introduction of mana and had required 144 sacrifices for each beastman created. Regardless of whether the individual was originally a Common grade human or Inferior grade, everyone who had undergone the ritual had been able to cultivate, though those with the Common grade version of the race had found their version of the beastman race was Uncommon grade while the grade of those who were originally Inferior grade humans was only Common.
With the introduction of mana, however, the ritual only required the sacrifice of 12 lives, and it seemed the leaders of the region had started using it on everyone who followed them in preparation for what was to come, including a lot of those unable to cultivate.
At the start, the region had contained more than 600,000 humans, about 25,000 of them cultivators, and only 3,000 of those number had been rebels.
By the point she’d arrived, however, a month after the return of cultivators from the tutorial, there were less than 400,000 humans left in the region and around 18,000 beastmen, though most of the new beastmen were stuck at G rank due to not yet having 3 skills.
They’d figured out how to naturally generate skills, however. Cultivators just had to repeat certain actions enough and a skill would naturally generate. They didn’t know the right actions to generate any skills higher than Inferior grade, but 15,000 new F ranks wouldn’t be a small number, even if they were all low quality.
Roland and the couple thousand cultivators in the region around Eshna wouldn’t stand a chance.
Thankfully, the beastmen weren’t actually united. Through her interrogation of the beastmen, Mila already knew there were three factions among the rebels in the area and, without outside forces to fight against for the last month, they’d been drifting further apart. Only one of those factions knew about Roland and, even in that faction, the number in the know could be counted on one hand.
The female mage who’d acted as leader of the 26 beastmen sent after Roland had been the only one to know about the prince’s existence when the group originally left, telling the others after they’d already traveled more than 100 kilometers. And, as far as she was aware, the only other beastmen to know were the leader of their faction, the beastman who’d escaped after attacking Roland, and one of the leader’s lieutenants who that beastman had originally told the information.
Mila didn’t know where the latter two were, but it was pretty easy to find the leader.
He was sleeping in the governor’s mansion and, with her Law Egg of Obfuscation now at peak grade and her stats increased from reaching F rank, it wasn’t hard to break in. He wasn’t alone, however, a human commoner woman with the weak aura of a G rank in the large bed with him.
The woman wasn’t young, likely in her early forties, a couple years older than the leader himself, and she wasn’t that pretty, drawing Mila’s interest. Like the man, she was naked, and, from what Mila could tell, the two of them had had sex before falling asleep, sex which had not been physically forced.
From interrogating the beastmen who’d tried to kill Roland, she knew the man wasn’t married, his wife and kids killed by a nobleman a couple years before the start of the integration, so she couldn’t figure out who the woman was without asking.
To that end, she took two swords out of the Left Hand of the Runescribe and placed them hovering in the air with telekinesis, then she used two of her other minds to grab the left ankles of both the leader and his lover and yanked them out from under the covers to hover in midair, the swords right next to their throats, while also stuffing both their mouths with the covers so they couldn’t scream.
“Hello, Mr. Beastman Leader and friend. Let’s have a little talk.” Mila sat down on the bed crosslegged and smiled at the two of them. “Now, if you scream after I remove the gags, I will kill you and then easily escape unharmed. Nod if you understand.”
They both nodded and Mila first released the gag on the woman. “Now, first, who are you?”
“K-Kaylen from Jorich Village, ma’am.”
“And who are you to him?” Mila casually pointed at the leader.
“W-we grew up in the same village.”
“I see. And did you choose to sleep with him by choice?”
“Y-yes.” The woman looked at the man when she spoke, and there was almost as much fear in her aura toward him as toward Mila, so, Mila had a good guess as to what had happened.
The woman was the leader’s first love, but he’d never had a chance with her back when he was weak. So, when he came into power, he forced her into his bed.
Mila felt bad for her, but there were most likely thousands of women on the planet right now going through similar circumstances, and Mila couldn’t individually help them all. The best she could do for them was what she already had planned, and that required pretending she didn’t care about the woman at all.
“Interesting, so you’re not really useful as a hostage.” Mila moved the sword away from the woman’s throat and then dropped her unceremoniously onto a carpet in the corner of the room. “Agree to stay quiet about everything you see tonight and I’ll let you live.”
Mila sent over a contract to the woman which basically said the woman would die if she revealed anything related to Mila and her activities this night during the next two years. The woman accepted, binding her own soul, and then Mila completely ignored her.
