"Psst…Trina...ah didn't wanna brig dis thin' up...but...ah tink oi gots meself a wee liiitle bit of a trouble..." Carmine pulled me to one side while we were walking.

"Sure, Carmine Love, you can tell me anything! I will try to help in any way I can!"

"Alrite...soo...oi think dat th' news of meh famileh not bein' der anehmore mighta broken somefin' inside o' mah head, cuz I keeps seeing weird stuff ever since oi got reaaaalleh drunk back dere in donkeh-town."

"What do you mean? What sort of weird stuff?"

*Bzzt*Uncloaking Sound*

"Oi keeps seeing IT everywhere oi turns mah head around! Look...tis' dere on th' donke’! Starin’ at meh wid its glowin oranj' eye of terrer! And then, after I blink, it aint dere no more!"

*Bzzt*Cloaking Sound*

*Bzzt*Uncloaking Sound*

*Bzzt*Cloaking Sound*

"PFF...MWAHAHAH! Girl, where has your brain been floating off to during the last week-and-a-half? Yi Gore isn’t one of your “imaginary friends” or hallucinations! He’s a real person! He’s just been fiddling with the invisibility switch built into his mechanical arm a lot!"

"Dat fing’s REAL? EEEK! Oi thought dat I wuz seein’ weird shaite fer th’ last week-or-so agin! It wouldn't ‘ave been th’ first toime... WHY’Z IT STARIN’ AT MEH LOIKE DAT DEN?"

"Cuz he thinks you’re as gorgeous as a Goddess? I think he has a crush on you!"

"It WOT? But evrehbode always told meh oim just an ugleh dwarf! Well, everybody else in th’ world ‘xcept mah old village, but now dey gone ferever…" Carmine sagged her shoulders in sadness.

"No, apparently by dwarf standards and customs, it seems that you are quite a looker, if what I’m told is true." I comforted her. "Can’t verify that information though, since there’s probably no other dwarf-person for hundreds of miles in this country, at least during this time."

Hearing us talk about himself, Yi Gore instantly turned towards us after uncloaking himself again, then gave Carmine his most charming smile. That served to only make her fear the midget even more, as his uneven crooked teeth were absolutely terrifying to look at, making his “charming smile” look more like a “psychopath yearning for your flesh” type of grin instead.

"Yi...that smile of yours could scare the feathers off a chicken. Did you ever think about fixing your teeth? We could probably pull most of them out and then regrow them again in proper order."

"I never really had a reason to care about how I looked in my life before meeting the Goddess. Simply being the “scary crazy midget” worked just fine for what I needed around the Sect. But, you are right. I should probably start fixing my appearance somehow. I’m not giving up on the arm though! It’s too useful!"

"I never said that you should. But you COULD fix your crooked teeth, uneven hairdo, and the rest of the pointless attachments you have all over your body, outside of the arm. And also the badly trimmed nails or the weird medicinal smell that wafts away from you...well...you’re a smart guy, you know what I mean."

"Yes...I should probably write down a list of those things that I could fix..."

━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━

After the whole bandit encounter, our group had resumed our travels at the same pace, and we had even ran into a couple of merchant groups that were headed in the same direction as ourselves, so we had been a part of a larger group for a while.

The merchants had behaved in a surprisingly welcoming manner, and they had shared their meals and carriages with us without asking for anything else but a few “blessings” in return, which Lingfeng had immediately performed for them in a flawless manner by using his Loremaster prowess and knowledge of Buddhist rituals and customs, making all of the traders believe with certainty that we were indeed just some traveling Buddhist pilgrims, and that Lingfeng was our real Senior Monk-Guardian. Fooling the merchants had been a nice achievement, since traders are generally some of the most suspicious and paranoid people in the world, due to the very nature of their job.

After encountering the merchants, I was glad that I had forced Lingfeng to describe for our group all of the major Do’s and Don’t as far as this world’s Buddist Monks were concerned, while our party had still been alone on the road.

Our entire group was now able to properly pretend that we were indeed Monks-In-Training, from the forms of address, the customary gestures, enunciations and general body language, to the Mantras and Prayers that we were all supposed to know in the first place.

It had taken quite a few bothersome days for us to get the whole pretense up-and-running to a decent level, with us doing lots of “practice” runs for all sorts of situations that we might run into along the road, but it had paid-off in the end.

They had all been good exercises for how we should behave and act during such encounters, so time had not been wasted. I was similarly glad that the road we were traveling on had been mostly barren, so nobody had seen us act up in the way we did, which would have caused most normal people to look at us like we were a bunch of lunatics.

Still, I kept wondering how far away we were from our destination, so I went and asked Lingfeng about it. He told me that we were about half-a-day’s worth away from our goal, if we kept our current walking speed. We had unfortunately been forced to leave the merchant group during the morning, as our paths had simply diverged, so we were alone once more. Personally, I had become tired of being on the road all of the time, so I was hoping that we would reach our goal today.

While a verbal approximation was alright, I was beginning to feel the need for a more accurate positioning of myself and my group on the world map, so I decided to just go and look for some Geographical Heightmaps inside of the Heavenly Library using my Astral Projection.

While I was splitting my attention between walking down the road and the Heavenly Library, I had decided to draw a proper map of our local surroundings using my available pencils and paper.

Well, at least draw it from a geological point of view, since whatever Geographical tomes had been stored inside of the Library were now outdated by a few thousand years. Still, stuff like the rivers and the mountains would not get moved or detoured that easily, therefore they could still be used as navigational landmarks.

I even asked for Xibei to give me a hand, since my own drawing skills were rather pitiful compared to his art, and the result was a rather decently detailed map of the nearby area in about 100 miles radius with us at the center, which I had crafted from mixing up several other types of maps, from the administrative ones that had towns, roads and trade-routes, to geological ones that had even included average Qi density. I took care of the proper scaling, and he took care of the heightmap and other misc. details.

Surprisingly, after our little map project was finished, we both received a mapmaking skill from the System.

Timmy: You have unlocked the skill [Cartographer].

The skill progress bar has been added to your status screen.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Description:

You can now update your World-map Menu by reading already-made maps.You can now also access the Minimap Menu in your interface. Objects and pathways in your line of sight will be automatically recorded onto the local Minimap.

At advanced levels of this skill, you will be able to conjure-up a set of magical maps that you will be able to share with your allies.

Conjuring a map will require certain base-components like paper, vellum or sheepskin, a writing instrument like feather and ink, pencil, charcoal or other alternatives, plus a certain amount of Qi based on how complicated the map you want to depict will become. The more details and accuracy, the higher the Qi expenditure.

Well, that’s quite nice! I should grind this skill to advanced as soon as possible, since everyone could use an accurate map.

"Will-E, can you come here for a second and…(HIC)"

Instantly, I felt my entire skin crawl, and I knew that something was staring at me with predatory eyes. If I had to describe it in a single phrase, it would be Killing Intent. A pure and unadulterated wish to harm other beings, without any other reason but the harm itself. Someone or something that we had not spotted yet really wanted all of us dead, and it was lying in ambush somewhere near us.

I instinctively dodged to one side, just as a carved wooden spear impaled itself into the ground right where I used to be a moment ago.

"Contact!" I immediately yelled to my group, as we all instantly went into combat mode.

A few more wooden spears flew from the nearby bushes, attempting to impale the other members of my group, but they all missed or got blocked, causing all of the creatures which had thrown the spears to now run towards us while screaming bloody murder in some gibberish language, and waving some makeshift wooden clubs that were more branches than proper weapons.

What came out of the bushes were some tiny little red creatures, even shorter than a gnome, with sharp teeth, glowing fiery eyes and a pair of devilish horns on top of their heads.

"Demonkin!" Yelled Lingfeng.

Unfortunately for us, they came rushing in rather large numbers, as more than 30 had come screaming out of the forest, so we had been forced to regroup in a circle, so that we would at least have our backs covered. Each one of us was now forced to face at least two or three of the pests, and we quickly found ourselves engaged in chaotic melee combat, as none of us had found enough time to pull out a ranged weapon.

I was now forced to defend myself by using only my side-arm dagger which I always kept at hand, while the other guys were using whatever they had been wearing on them as well for impromptu weapons and protection. Fungus was using his backpack as a shield and the forest machete he usually carried in the other hand as a heavy saber, Liliam was using her old ruined and cordless zither as a baseball bat, Xibei was also following Fung's method and was now using his backpack as a defensive buffer while wielding a short Chinese sword in the other hand, while Jin had simply set his own fists on fire. Carmine was wielding her beloved Gibsson, and Lingfeng was using a long monk-staff as a makeshift blunt weapon/spear to keep the little demons at bay.

I immediately went into bullet-time mode and I stabbed the closest demon right through the ocular socket, causing it to remain affixed onto my dagger. It had come running towards me while foaming at the mouth with a look of pure uncoordinated hatred in his glowing tiny eyes while swinging his branch-club, but after I had parried the stick away, I had instantly plunged my weapon back into its head before he could even retaliate.

Unable to retrieve my weapon, I simply used the now-dangling corpse as a makeshift meatshield, causing all of the other demons that were behind the first one to simply hit their now deceased partner instead of my body, as they took uncoordinated wild swings with their horribly-made clubs towards my direction.

As the demon dangling from my dagger in front of me was now dead, which meant that he had no spiritual shielding to protect his flesh anymore, I decided to immediately plunge my branch tentacles into its body, as I redirected all of the thermal Qi that had yet to dissipate from the front sections of the corpse towards the rear, causing the entire backside of the little demon to detonate in a steam-filled spray of blood and gore, as his entire front section turned into a block of ice instead.

Of course, all of the damage had been directed towards the incoming swarm of demonkin, as the remaining frozen section had acted like a shielding for me, while the back had acted like an uncontrolled blood-spell explosion against the enemies.

Blinded by the gore spray and the impact of the impromptu corpse-explosion, the other demonkin began to reel in pain and haphazardly attempted to retreat, sending their entire formation into disarray.

Taking advantage of the temporary confusion and lull in the battle that had been caused by my blood explosion, I pulled out a few of those nasty pepper pills which I immediately tossed into the demon-crowd, and then I retrieved my bow to shoot at any targets that were close enough to my proximity that they could be considered a threat, as I pumped them full of arrows.

Since I was still maintaining myself in bullet-time mode, my shots were rather accurate, as I kept headshotting the little demons before they could get anywhere near me. In my proximity, all of my group members had also taken care of their first wave of assailants, as Fungus had cleaved his own demons in half, Liliam had clubbed them unconscious, Xibei had made them bleed from a thousand cuts while electrocuting them by using the sword as a makeshift taser, and Jin had simply incinerated everything in his path by acting like a human flamethrower. The areas with the most casualties though had been on the side of the dwarven lady and of the Windmage, as they had literally cut a swath of destruction across the incoming horde of screaming demons. The Legendary pickaxe that ignored all armor would simply obliterate the little pests upon impact, while Lingfeng's Windblades would bisect anything in their way for hundreds of metres, leaving all of the small demons in their path torn into tiny little pieces.

Before they could even realise what a huge blunder they have done by attacking our group, we had already cleaned up all of the Demonkin, including the ones which had tried to flee, as they had found themselves shot full of arrows by me and Fung, or chopped in half by Windblades.

Even the pair of larger demons that had seemed to act like the “leaders” of this particular group had not been able to put up a fight, as they had simply been shot down by our party without even having a chance to retaliate, just like the other demonkin.

Unfortunately, we had also found out that Will-E’s idea of “combat mode” was to huddle down while holding his head, as he had seemingly not been able to automatically perform any hostile actions, even against the demonkin, and nobody had been able to spare the time to order him around to do something. So much for my golem-tank hopes and dreams.

Wiping away the dark demon blood which smelled absolutely horrendous from all of our weapons, we began to turn the bodies over to try and find out who our assailants had been. Even as we were flipping the corpses around and were checking them for loot, they had already started to smoulder and disintegrate into ashes at a steady but slow rate, like the very World was rejecting their very existence onto the surface of the earth.

It made sense though, since these bodies had been conjured through demonic rituals, and were basically soul-containers made out of congealed Qi which had been mixed with pieces of soil and water to create these body-like makeshift structures that would simply dissipate once nothing was holding them together.

*Ptew* "Gods dammit! What the hell are the Hellbound doing around here? There must be an outpost of a demonic sect somewhere in the proximity, which has summoned these guys as cannon-fodder in large quantities." Cursed Lingfeng. "I thought that we would get away from the influence of the demoniacs by heading towards our destination, but it seems that these guys are popping up everywhere nowadays. We cannot simply ignore this. We have to see where these demons have originated from, and take care of the problem right at the source immediately."

"What the heck are these guys anyway? They do not look like any of the races I know about." I poked one of the smouldering corpses.

"That's because they are “pure” demons summoned up from Hell. They don't belong to any of the races from the surface world. The Hellbound are a sort-of involution of the Imps, as they lack the wings of the aforementioned demonkind, but retain most of the other bodily structure.

They are the lowest-rung minions that you can find in the burning hells, and are used as slave labour or canon-fodder by most demon-overlords and devils.They are tribal in nature, as you will always find them in rather large packs, sometimes with even a magic caster or two among the members of the group, but they are rather dumb and easily scared-off, as you might have noticed by yourselves.

The true danger though comes from their ability to multiply with each other, as they have a very short “growth” cycle, with any of them being able to breed with any other demon, as they are all basically functional hermaphrodites. After that, they lay small clutches of imp-eggs that can spawn and reach maturity in a matter of days, at least if there is enough magic in the proximity to fuel the growth. They do not actually need to eat or drink to grow up like normal people, but rather they “feast” on the magic in their environment to grow up, because their makeshift bodies are magical in nature in the first place.

You could summon barely a handful of them as a cultist, then leave them to breed with eachother near a steady magic source. As a result, you could grow yourself an army of thousands of these things in a matter of weeks, if left unchecked. Sure, they are weak and rather easily killed, but the strength-in-numbers that they can reach is the dangerous aspect about them, instead of the power of their individuals. Therefore, we must immediately find the source of this “infestation”, before it can get any larger."

"Well..crap! There go my peaceful days...I guess Momma System simply got tired of waiting..." I frowned.