NOVEL NEXT Chapter 51: New Subordinates
Mila
A soul could only accept so many contracts and that amount was determined by the strength of the contracts and the value of the Soul stat. But there was a very easy trick to make an almost unlimited amount. Just don’t bind yourself.
It was relatively simple, as all you had to do was make contracts where all the terms limited only the other party, but in practice it was difficult. People would pretty much only agree to that type of contract when the alternative was death or something even worse. And, without the anchor of a second soul, the contracts were extremely easy to break for anyone with the right type of skill.
In the outside world, almost every organization would have multiple people with such skills, but most of the natives only had four skills total, three from the tutorial and one from their F rank class. Contract breaking skills were not common in the normal sense of the word, and never below Uncommon in grade, so, among all the native cultivators, there were probably at most 5 with such skills. And, of those, probably only one if any would be able to break the level of contracts Mila created with her Legendary grade contract skill markedly increased by the combination of her racial ability and main class, even if the contract wasn’t properly anchored.
What she had planned would most likely not work on any of the invasion forces, but against the rebels there was nothing blocking her.
Mila spent the next few days hunting in the other two major cities in the region, finding cultivators raping civilians and then silently killing them while they were in the heat of lust. She would then silence the civilian with a contract and move on, and, over only three days of work, she completely filled Aalam’s Small Soul Storage with high quality souls which could keep them both fed for a couple months.
Sadly, however, even killing 18 F ranks wasn’t enough to level her up once. With a race at Epic grade and two classes at Legendary and Heroic, it would apparently take a lot more primal energy than normal for her to level, and that was one of the reasons even genius cultivators generally didn’t choose such high grade classes.
During those three days, she hadn’t been anywhere near as busy as the rebel leader, however. He’d started by pulling in some of the less loyal of his own subordinates and using his loyal subordinates to threaten them into accepting the contract or dying. Then he used those subordinates under contract to do the same to his truly loyal subordinates. The process had then snowballed and he stayed in the governor’s mansion as his ever increasing number of soul contracted subordinates brought in more and more cultivators.
Over those first three days, he’d started with only rebels, but then he expanded to other cultivators as well, and a lot more people, most of them ideal future subordinates for someone like Roland, started choosing death instead. Thankfully, however, the leader was practical. As she’d expected, he didn’t want to sacrifice the humans who agreed to be his subordinates to her for food, so he just beat those who didn’t agree near to death and used some of his subordinates with restriction skills to keep them imprisoned.
Mila started hunting beasts in the area for primal energy, though they didn’t give as much as cultivators, nor did they advance her Hunter of Sentients boon. Still, it was good practice for her skills and something to do while she waited.
Then, six days after her initial contract with the leader, Mila got her first shipment of 8 human cultivators. As agreed, they were all left unconscious near a small pool in the jungle by some of the leader’s subordinates, and, after a bit of questioning, Mila killed the three beastmen left to spy on what she’d do with them.
Then she picked up the 8 with telekinesis and moved to a secret location she’d found during her hunting, out of range of most surveillance abilities, and woke them all up.
“Who here is under contract with the beastman leader? Raise a hand.” Mila, in her guise as an ordinary looking commoner, smiled down at the group as they woke, all too injured to stand, and watched as two of their number worked hard to raise one of their hands with shocked expressions.
They hadn’t had to follow her words, but they’d felt their souls start to burn when they hadn’t, and so quickly complied.
“Ignore all previous orders from the rebel leader and tell me what they were.”
“If we survived, we were supposed to report back,” one of the men stammered out, seemingly having been exhausted by the effort of raising a single limb. “That’s all.”
Then the other said the same thing.
“Fair enough.” Mila looked at the other six, all also still lying on the forest floor, unable to even move their arms let alone stand under their own power. “And why did all of you disagree to take the contract the leader provided?”
“Jorith is a bastard who’d kill his own family if it gave him power,” one of the men growled. “There’s no way I’d serve him.”
“Interesting.” From their auras, pretty much everyone agreed with the man’s statement. The two who’d capitulated likely had family in the area and just had more to lose. It made sense why the rebel leader had chosen to get rid of these men first. A couple of them even seemed close to forming a Law Egg, which was very impressive on Hira at the moment.
“What’s your view on Roland Raphaiya?”
“The prince?” one of them asked, the brother of the one who’d already spoken.
“Yes.” Mila nodded.
“Not much to form a view on.” The man frowned as he looked up at her. “His father was reportedly an ass, but all we really know about the prince was he was talented in the tutorial.”
From their auras, it seemed everyone agreed with that statement.
“Any interest in working under him for a couple of months? You’d be left with only the same responsibilities as most of the cultivators in his domain after.” Mila sent the six who hadn’t already agreed to the leader’s contract a modified version of the contract she’d forced everyone back in Eshna to sign.
They’d have to protect those unable to cultivate if the settlement they were in was attacked, with the temporary loss of 80% of their stats for 24 hours if they didn’t. They couldn’t attack her, the lord of the Territory, or the overlord of the Territory without their souls crumbling. And they would have to serve Roland Raphaiya for 80 days and couldn’t go back to the region the rebels were in control of until he gave them the ok.
“You’re performing some kind of scam on Jorith?” the first man asked after looking through the contract, learned enough that the contract came to him as writing instead of spoken words. “You gave him that artifact and there is some trick behind it?”
Mila just smiled.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
“An ally of the prince.”
The man stared up at her. “Your aura is too strong. If you were in our tutorial, you would have stood out.”
“I wasn’t.”
The man, still lying unable to move on the floor, seemed to give up, his aura showing he understood he wasn’t going to get more from her with that line of questioning. “What do you get from helping us?”
“If the natives of a planet undergoing an apocalypse style integration stop all twelve invasions and a native then takes up the position of planet head, that native will earn a token for a special kind of trial.” Mila squatted down so she wasn’t towering over the men anymore. “My boss and I want that token so we can gain a possible reward from that trial, the ability to go home.
“It doesn’t really matter who I partner with, but Roland seems to actually care about the citizens of this planet, and that’s a lot more than I can say about most leaders. So, my boss decided to help the prince instead of one of the other possible leaders.
“He and I both don’t really care for mass murder of defenseless civilians.”
“What if we don’t accept the contract you’re offering.”
Mila kept looking at the man directly in his eyes, not changing either her voice or expression. “I’ll kill you.”
The man took a deep breath. “Alright. I agree.”
As Mila had already noticed, the man was the de facto leader of the other five, so, when he agreed, they quickly did as well. Mila then placed her hands on the belly of the leader’s younger brother and started the process of healing him.
His wounds were quite a bit more complex than just crushed legs, so it took nearly half an hour to get him back in near perfect shape, but the knowledge flowing into her mind from her resonance with the Law of The Healer as she worked made it all possible and she felt her Law Egg slightly advance.
With the second healing, it then advanced even further, and again with the third, the time it took her to heal the same type of complex wounds on each man slightly faster each time. Then, after she finished healing the seventh man, her Law Egg advanced.
Congratulations!
Your Law Egg of The Healer has advanced to peak grade.
Your soul is affected by your understanding of Laws.
Base Stats +4, Soul +12
She then quietly healed the eighth man, gave some strict orders to the two under the contract from the beastman leader, and sent all eight of them to Roland in Eshna.
